Diptych for our first assignment in Nina's Techniques, Practices, Strategies Class

Today, I had the pleasure of attending my first Techniques, Practices and Strategies Class with Nina Katchadourian. A candid, hilarious multimedia artist whose newest work "Seat Assignment" explores the airplane, and her endless hours of flying as a time capsule.

Her first assignment to us was to, in the hour of the class, recall a pivotal image in our mind of another artist, and then make an image to follow the image as the completion of a diptych. I chose an image from Mary Ellen Mark's Falkland Road, because I have been revisiting this work lately--its color, its shameless vulgar masculinity, its astounding access to this secret secret world. I look at it a lot too because I've lately been taken with a woman from India, so ideas of arranged marriage are coming up for me.

There's a lot more to Mary Ellen's series besides overt hating on men; there's a lot of masculine femininity and feminine masculinity, grotesque intimacy and cultural violence, and exploration of sex as a commodity and as an animalistic norm. Mostly the pictures speak for themselves. 

My other interest in Falkland Road comes as a way for me to seek some sort of understanding of machismo culture. Today I am angry as I realize how masculine this neighborhood, Bay Ridge, is. I don't think its an accident that I now call Bay Ridge home.

So I chose to make a screenshot of a text message with this woman I've been so obsessive (does obsession approach hatred ever), enmeshed with. The screenshot, for one, serves as this new type of documentary for me. The two images together explore the dichotomy between the immediate sexual and the thought out, helpless idealization of love, as well as the clash between my experience of being an American Lesbian and the experience of being a woman in India.  Also to note, it is very interesting to look at how one thing can be so removed from us when it is across the world from us, yet another thing so menial can be so intense, so comparing the image of the text with the MEM image explores the scale of intensity. When I look at Falkland Road, I feel a sadness rooted in my lack of understanding of this experience, and when I look at the texts that have ensued over the past month, I feel gutted.