Hiking with a friend, or, how feminism makes everything better

This summer i did a lot of day hiking. I did some with my family - and i did some with M, a feminist friend from college. The experiences were radically different. With my family, a dynamic would develop where one or more persons would either be able to walk faster and farther than others, or believe that they could/should do so. And they would make that obvious to everyone, and pressure others into walking at this faster pace, and not take them seriously if they wanted, or needed, to stop.
And none of this happened with M. There were many reasons for this, but one of them lay in the techniques - the routine behaviors - that we had both learned in or from explicitly feminist communities, techniques that, for various reasons, I was not able to bring to bear on my family's dynamic.

• Checking in: both soliciting information ("how are you feeling?") and giving it spontaneously ("i'm starting to feel some strain on my ankle") before it has direct consequences. With my family, no one said "i'm tired" unless it was a distress signal: "i need to stop now."
• Always acquiescing to the other's request for a break, a glass of water, a picture, whatever. Consequently, we stopped with some frequency, always earlier relative to tiredness level than with my family. 
• Generally matched pace and non-verbally kept track.
• Made all decisions collaboratively and in good faith. E.g., traded a backpack back and forth at even intervals, unless modified by verbal agreement. No wondering "If i ask zim to carry the backpack for five minutes now, will ze keep it for five hours until we get back down, and refuse to hand it over?"*

These routine behaviors, you might say, boil down to two values: respect for the other person's personhood and, correspondingly, zer wishes, and open communication and trust. But these values relied on the behavioral patterns for their actual existence in the world. In other words, the point is not that i or even M are always wonderful respectful people living in perfect mutual trust. but that we were trained to ask certain questions and respond in particular ways to other's words - especially to particular code phrases like "i need x" (in other circumstances "i'm not comfortable" or "i don't feel safe" are more obviously code phrases to which one is trained to respond) - and this training enabled us, at least in this relatively low-stress situation, to behave better towards each other than we otherwise would have.
The relationship between core values - doubtless historically determined to some extent but as close to a solid thing as there is in ethics - and the formulations we use and the behavior we train and encourage is not one of necessity. These behavioral patterns are contingent and doubtless imperfect. One flaw i can point out is that they depend to some extent on code phrases; they are much more effective within the community than without, such that i could not simply behave in this way with my family and expect it to work. More crucially, this flaw means that these very systems can end up functioning as behaviors of exclusion, a violation of core principles; that is, people who have not received this training and do not respond appropriately are punished (usually by being treated less well socially) and can be chased away. Probably we could have come up with many other, and some better, systems to bring our values into real existence in the world. Doubtless we will; as these behaviors hopefully train us to be better people, and more alert listeners, and to better enact our values, we will correspondingly adjust the behaviors.**

These values, and these behavioral patterns and formulations, are ones in which feminist communities train people. I'm sure that other justice groups do the same, but my experience of it is specifically with feminism.*** A lot of this training is implicit, absorbed by osmosis when one spends time in feminist communities or with feminists.
And a lot isn't. It's the consent workshops everyone hates to sit through; it's trainings for educators and people in charge; for me, it was Yale Swing & Blues (a wonderful stealth-feminist group) organizing everything from dance-etiquette trainings after dance lessons to large volunteer workshops where we discuss what to do when someone makes you uncomfortable, how to gently prompt people into trying the other role, how to call out people, that you don't offer feedback, how not to create a hierarchy...
I've been aware of it: aware what a difference it makes, aware of my own behavior and how it contributes positively or negatively, aware of safe and unsafe spaces. But this - hiking - was the first time i realized so explicitly that feminist training can make things better even in ways that on the surface have little to do with feminism.

*A lot of these sound like specific complaints, and they are, because that's the best way to illustrate what i'm trying to say. That is, I do not aim to complain about my family. They're wonderful people behaving in ordinary ways, without the benefit of feminist training. I really had a great time hiking with them; there were just a lot of little things that grated, and that made the experience just a little bit more fraught than it could have been. These little things were noticeable to me, and prompted these reflections.

**In fancy philosophical terms, virtue ethics.

***Yet a third digression: this seems to me to be somewhat of an American thing. The anecdotal evidence: i've encountered it much more among Americans than not (among a sub-group of Americans of course), and the French word for "safe" is ... "safe." Of course I haven't hung out enough in French or German or Mexican queer-feminist circles.

Paul Klee

Fire in the evening, 1929, MoMA

I saw a Klee exhibit at the Orangerie this weekend. I was blown away yet again.

Unfortunately I can post no images from there, so this is a work that I have not actually seen, but which I do love and will hopefully go see at MoMA sometime soon.

Formalism

At the Pompidou, I'm working on my second article. My first was on Lee Bontecou, and this one is on Magdalena Abakanowicz. Both were chosen almost at random, because I simply don't know enough modern/contemporary art history to know really what I like, who I like, who I want to learn about. These two artists were picked because, from a sample size of one or two works, I found them interesting.
They are both scuptors. They also share a lot. It was while starting on the Abakanozicz piece that I realized how similar they were in many superficial ways - color choice, for instance - that may or may not reveal something about my taste, but also in two very important areas, theoretically speaking.

When we think of highly formalist art, we think of art that is sterile - either the oh-so-carefully rule-bound compositions of academicism, or the constructivist dream of art devoid of culturally contingent connotations - an attractive vision to be sure, but one which is doomed to end up totally devoid of meaning, if it could ever succeed. Yet art that is not formalist in some sense cannot be good art.

What do I mean by formalist, then? I mean art that sincerely engages with and reveals its form, its medium. Art that does not try to make a whole, a self-sufficient statement, or to conceal the secret of its making, but admits its materiality. This can express itself in different ways.

Lee Bontecou's early work consists of welded structures to which she tied canvas with wire, and include at least one black hole. See the image at left (Untitled, 1959, welded steel, canvas, black fabric, and wire, 147.5 x 148.5 x 44 cm, MoMA.) The work engages its materiality in many ways.

The roughness of the steel, the wire stitching, show you how the work was made. It shows you the physicality of the frame and the canvas which are usually hidden in a painting - the work comes out of its materials rather than being imposed upon them. It reminds you of what canvas is, how it is a thick, rough fabric with that we use in our daily lives, in our clothing, our tents, our machines. It reminds us that the canvas fades and decays.

At the same time, the work challenges us to rethink illusionism. Because it has real relief, because the black hole really is a hole, it reminds us that painting is flat, even if it seems to go beyond itself into three dimensions. It uses the rules of proportion in what could be an illusionistic manner but it is actually physically extant. Yet it also exaggerates its relief, challenging our conceptions of sculpture as a superficial object in space.

So her work, existing between both painting and sculpture, challenges the formal conventions of both in a way that subverts our expectations and embraces, to transcend, its limitations as an art object.

Abakanowicz does something similar in her very process-dependent sculpture, which revels in the accidents of its making and degradation, either made of organic material or successfully transforming an inorganic material like bronze into a living thing.