{"id":5340,"date":"2014-09-20T13:36:45","date_gmt":"2014-09-20T17:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/?p=5340"},"modified":"2014-09-20T13:36:45","modified_gmt":"2014-09-20T17:36:45","slug":"when-popping-your-cherry-be-careful-not-to-choke-on-the-stem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/when-popping-your-cherry-be-careful-not-to-choke-on-the-stem\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhen Popping Your Cherry, Be Careful Not To Choke On The Stem”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Review of Milk and Night Exhibition at Sensei Gallery<\/em><\/h2>\n
\"07_Marie_Tomanova\u00a6\u00fc\"<\/a>
Milk and Night guerilla Fashion Action at Lincoln Center with Legacy Fatale and Go! Push Pops\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Author | Rachel Hodin<\/h2>\n

Photography by Marie Tomanova<\/em><\/p>\n

“And how does one ‘become a woman’? How does one earn this title? By being active.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/span>In 1977, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous wrote in \u201cLa venue \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9criture,\u201d \u201cEternity, it is the voice of milk mingled with night\u2026\u201d And when I happened upon Ange\u2019s Instagram \u2013 one of the three members of fashion design and art collective threeASFOUR \u2013 I could hear echoes of the French feminist philosopher. Currently, Ange is using her Instagram<\/a> as a quasi platform to showcase her work as a solo artist. In one Instagram post, she\u2019s crassly sucking on a red lollipop, with rainbow-colored hair brushed exaggeratedly to one side and a caption that reads: \u201cWhen Popping Your Cherry, Be Careful Not To Choke On The Stem.\u201d It\u2019s been thirty-seven years since \u201cLa venue \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9criture\u201d was published and yet women are still fighting the same feminist fight, just in more high-tech, abbreviated ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

Freud was one of the many forces that drove Cixous to theorize and write on the subject of feminism. She was particularly irked by his theory on castration anxiety, which portrayed women as devoid of any unique qualities and, instead, described them within the confines of the male gender. To Freud, women were like men, except lacking. And while some might scoff at this absurd theory now, the truth is, we haven\u2019t progressed much since. Cixous\u2019 words feel just as urgent now as they did when she wrote them. \u201cWe all fell for this title,\u201d Coco Dolle told me of \u201cMilk and Night,\u201d an all-female exhibition that\u2019s currently on display at Sensei Gallery. \u201cIt is poetical and quite representative of a legacy of feminist thinkers.\u201d<\/span>Coco is one of the four curators of \u201cMilk and Night,\u201d whose work is also on display. Anne Sherwood Pundyk, another one of the curators whose art is on display as well, told me, \u201cThere is a crisis in feminism. Even as the fourth wave of feminism is generating attention and discussion, the pushback in politics and religion outweighs any progress.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But to say there\u2019s been no progress, whatsoever, would be to ignore the twenty-one artists featured in the show and the ways in which each of them found unique ways to express the power of a united feminist front.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ange\u2019s works \u2013 many of which you can find on her Instagram \u2013 consist of a series of \u201cauto portraits,\u201d as she calls them, or \u201cemotional blueprints\u201d that are basically a series of self-portraits, each representing a different character or disposition. She calls them \u201cmood swinging,\u201d a term that often stirs up the stigmatization of women. Why is it, for instance, that we never hear of men having emotional mood swings? It brings to mind the ugly side of women, the self-hating side. And it seems India Salvor Menuez, another artist featured in the show, shares this outlook with Ange. When I asked her for a succinct description of her feminist disposition, she told me to \u201cGoogle \u2018hot crazy matrix\u2019\u201d \u2013 which led me to a meticulously detailed matrix on the complexities and intricacies of crazy girls and how their level of hotness influences this \u2013 and to \u201cmeditate on that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As the title \u201cMilk and Night\u201d suggests, crucial to the idea of a united feminist front is paying heed to our feminist predecessors. Anne Sherwood Pundyk\u2019s piece \u201cThe Revolution Will Be Painted<\/a>\u201d was inspired by painting\u2019s notorious history of excluding women. Coco Dolle took this idea even further with her multimedia piece \u201cExcavation Cave Of My Dreams.\u201d After seeing the Werner Herzog documentary that told the story of the oldest human-painted caves in the South of France, Coco decided to imagine a world in which the first artist ever was a woman.<\/span><\/p>\n

\""Shadow<\/a>
Anne Sherwood Pundyk, “Shadow Realm” (2013) 42″ x 46″, oil and acrylic on linen.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The perennial debate over whether or not women should openly declare themselves as feminists is, for these artists, irrelevant. For these women, being a feminist was never so much a choice as it was their <\/span>only <\/i>choice. To be a woman, however, requires a bit more effort. Coco directed me to a particularly relevant Simone de Beauvoir quote, \u201cOne is not born a woman, one becomes a woman.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And how does one \u201cbecome a woman\u201d? How does one earn this title? By being active. And reverberating throughout the exhibit is a strong, active feminism \u2013 as well as an active fight against our society\u2019s silent, yet deeply oppressive patriarchal forces \u2013 that could only be described as Nicki Minaj flavored. For her work \u201cTRANACONDA MANCANDY,\u201d Katie Cercone \u2013 another one of the show\u2019s curators \u2013 played footage of protesters on the frontlines in Ferguson, Missouri, singing \u201cthis is a war cry,\u201d with an image of an Anaconda snake eating a female avatar as visual overlay.\u00a0 It\u2019s a spoof on Nicki Minaj\u2019s \u201cAnaconda,\u201d which pays heed to the curvy, feminine figure. And, when trying to navigate feminism, the female body — the place from which all of civilization sprung \u2013 feels like a perfect place to start.<\/span><\/p>\n

When asked for a line that\u2019s most representative of her feminist beliefs, Katie gave me the perfect Judy Chicago quote: \u201cCunt as temple, tomb, cave and flower.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Do not miss the closing event on\u00a0SUNDAY September 21st, 12-6PM <\/b>(GALLERINAS: A Performance closing party)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Gallery Sensei<\/a> is located at 278 Grand Street, 2nd Floor, NYC, 10002 (btwn Eldridge Street and Forsyth Street<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Review of Milk and Night Exhibition at Sensei Gallery Author | Rachel Hodin Photography by Marie Tomanova “And how does one ‘become a woman’? How does one earn this title? By being active.” \u00a0In 1977, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous wrote in \u201cLa venue \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9criture,\u201d \u201cEternity, it is the voice of milk mingled with night\u2026\u201d And\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[45,1371,452,106,834,1367,510,1370,135,189,134,1369,1368,728,307],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-5340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-art","tag-castration-anxiety","tag-exhibition","tag-feminism","tag-marie-tomanova","tag-milk-and-night","tag-oppression","tag-patriarchy","tag-posture","tag-posture-mag","tag-posture-magazine","tag-rachel-hodin","tag-sensei-gallery","tag-society","tag-visual-art-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/10_Marie-Tomanova.jpg?fit=960%2C640","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6QBV8-1o8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5340"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5367,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5340\/revisions\/5367"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5340"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=5340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}