{this sunday}

This weekend I took a break from academic work. Yesterday was old bookstore and then having dessert and coffee with a friend. Today was celebration for the pubs and finally turning the chapter 3 of my dissertation to the co-director. The books I bought yesterday:

1. Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire

2. Alcestis by Kate Beutner

3. Rice by Nikki Finney

4. Vice by Ai

5. Sin by Ai

6. Gabriela Mistral Reader

I totally shouldn't have done this given than I am SO broke. But my excuse is, I am a writer and an academic lit-critter. So, books are one of the essential components of my means of production.

Today, I finally went to Austin Museum of Art and saw the Mona Lisa Project exhibit they are hosting right now. It is an interesting concept in itself. For me, a project like this one basically boils down to an aesthetic interrogation of the notion of beauty itself. For a while now, I have ceased to think the terms beauty and aesthetics as politically neutral. There is no way one can divorce these two words from ideologies of race and gender central to modernity. So, the fact that this exhibit has taken up a visual text which has long been understood as one of the iconic documents to provide the humanity with a definition and demonstration of beauty is interesting in itself. But, I wished the artists had pushed the boundaries more. For one thing, the project does not attempt to interrogate whiteness enough. There is only one work by an artist of color. And the inclusion of that work seemed very much like tokenism.

But, I am also wary of the way the women artists themselves have tried to perform Mona Lisa. While that act does problematize the inherent passivity and all the connotations of body-beauty image, the women are still very much the object of photographic/artistic gaze. Very rarely do they assume the active creator/artist persona themselves. So, for me, most of the visual texts ended up reifying what it was trying to question. But all in all, an interesting show, and I would be interested to see if this particular group of collaborating artists take this idea further.

After the exhibit, came coffee and explorations of some new coffee-shops. And then, some writing time with tea. I am trying to revise a short story based on the feedback I got from my last workshop. Will blog about that process later.