Dorothy Siemens

Found 237 results for 'art'

Notes on Wifey

A letter from the editors.

Whose Healing is It, Anyway?

the impact of #saytheirnames

Sign of the Times

Find Your Perfect Protest Sign

Getting Down

Thanksgiving in the Little Space

Call for Submissions: Definitive Guide

What defines a definitive guide? A definitive guide is correct and complete, demonstrating full comprehension and practical mastery. Guides are texts and people that disseminate knowledge: manuals, how-tos, and tour guides. A guide is only definitive, however, for a moment in time. Technology and fashion change, leaving experts on things like lace bonnets or JavaScript […]

The Trump Who Cried Witch

Unruly Language and the American Witch Hunt

United Stunts of America

Paul Swartz and Lena H. Chandhok's quiz “United Stunts of America” explores America’s varied history of political stunts—from the shocking to the downright strange.

Ex-Wifey Dream Diary

Danielle Drori tells the story of her divorce through dream interpretation, pouring pyschoanalytic theory into a stream of the unconscious.

Austerity's Fruit Ripens

harvesting #redfored

NEBULA PAINLESS FOAM PET

Kirsten Ihns's ekphrastic poem, prompted by Kim Keever's photograph Abstract 10245b.

The Monthly Ekphrastic

Lucy Sparrow’s 8 ‘till late

Making a Tourist Town

Shinjini Dey defines the trans-historical aesthetic category of Darjeeling, a place where tourists use cell phone videos and buying power to preserve the colonial imaginary and where local workers constantly, anxiously, recreate that imaginary anew.

Brutal Advertising

evidence and profit

Knowing, Not Knowing, Knowing Better

Abby Kluchin and Patrick Blanchfield take on our anxieties and fantasies about whether there’s a doctor in the house through an explanation of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s sujet supposé savoir, the “subject supposed to know.”

Dear God—or Hannah Arendt—

Please Make This Documenta Acid Trip Stop!

Banana Consciousness

Banana Empires and Banana Republics

Fight Club: Mythopoetics and the Crisis of Masculinity

Annette LePique on Fight Club, Rumblr, and the enduring marketing appeal of masculinity in crisis

Parenting and Property

the Prodigal Son in Modern Life

Grief and Undoing

We are all going to die.

The Monthly Ekphrastic

Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum

Dead Celebs

David Bowie and public memory

Wraithcore, or: I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going

Abigail Merrick's "wraithcore" describes what it's like to be "nocturnal or insomniac, depressive or moody, predisposed towards isolating oneself socially, to feeling marginal or overlooked, not quite believed or not quite taken seriously as a subject, or more specifically a subject with agency."

A Culture of Greed

2008 in The Bling Ring and The Big Short

Cowboys and Aliens

Neotribalist fantasies

Dunham the Dilettante

authorship and the Jane-of-all-trades work ethic

A Gloomy and Tedious Period

Learning from 1816

Anxiety in Real Time

hysterical advertising

The Visual World of Girls

Form, Style, and Intimacy

Mapping Illocality

Joely Fitch on Emily Dickinson's "illocality" and Sarah Ahmed's questions of orientation, locations only mappable by their absences, defamiliarization and possibility.

Death Ladies

the feminized narrative of funerals

Notes on Weak Aesthetics

A letter from the editors

Your Intro To OITNB

OITNB's Evocative Images

Postpartum Document(s)

archiving through soup

OK! OK, Boomer: the Critical Theory of Contemporary Angst

Ajay Singh Chaudhary on the sharpened passions at the beginning of class consciousness, the denunciation of the mid-century way of life, and politicized aesthetics.

Sugar, Subjection, and Selfies

The Online Afterlife of A Subtlety

Underthinking Racism

Getting angry is not a failure

Deciphering the Graven Messages of the Dead

Allison C. Meier on creaks, hauntings, and cemeteries: weapons against forgetting

The (Final) Nail (In the Coffin)

Click below for a glorious, full-size flowchart

“Mission Accomplished”: Fictive Victories at the End of History

Suzanne Schneider on George W. Bush's proclamation of victory, sacrifice and progress in the philosophy of history, and dread and waste at history's end.

Memory and Youth Work

The Politics of Military Cemeteries in Germany

Between Rival Utopias: Craft and Community in the Counterculture

Sarah Warren on communal societies, craft as therapy, and the "dark matter" of amateur craft clubs

The Exclusion Games

Olympic Exceptionalism in Rio de Janeiro

Making Markers

Liz Collins discusses how a collection of maps shaped her new body of work for the exhibition Wayfinding.

General Access

Hair Jewelry and Godey's Lady's Book

Response to 'Critical Feelings'

9/11 is in no way a turning point

Mom Versus the Experts

Danya Glabau's “momming,” a feminized relationship to power and work, requires a caregiver to navigate a fatiguing system of experts, from doctors to Instagram sleep trainers.

Call for Submissions: Republican Speech

Submissions are now closed. “Poetry is republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself, and in which all the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote.” –Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragments no. 65 The theme of Dilettante Army’s Spring 2019 issue is Republican Speech. Speech that builds […]

Being-in-your-Crocs: A Micro-Phenomenology of Foam Footwear

Are Crocs ✨aesthetic✨? Tom Martin writes the phenomenology of Crocs—how we see them on other people, and how the world is revealed to us by wearing them.

Dystopias are for Girls

Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan

Cooking with Class

Food as Ornament

Instagram and Protest

Cake in the Imaginary Economy

In remembrance of Jeremy Stephen Shedd

Jeremy Stephen Shedd passed away in December of 2022.

Huang's Web

caught up in whiteness

We Wear the Mask at the Club

Drawing on breathless vernacular speech, richly painted images that seem to bloom and blow away as quickly as dandelion floss, and the rhythms and idioms of hip hop, Joseph Earl Thomas's poem explores what it means to think and speak about other people in a few of the many languages of Black masculinity.

Documenting Detainment: The Carceral Design of ICE’s National Detainee Handbook

Benjamin Williams reads through a state document designed to "assert authority and avoid responsibility"—then shows how artist Pablo Allison flips the page back to humanity and agency.

Menacing the Mediation

We notice there is a picture most when it breaks.

Call for Submissions: Clubs

Please note: Submissions are now closed A club is an organization that exists somewhere between unbridled enthusiasm and institutional authority. A club is a convivial wonderhouse–not quite a group of strangers, not yet a hallowed hall; it provides solidarity without bureaucracy, learning without academia, association without loyalty oaths. There are all kinds of clubs: book, […]

Dilettante Army Salon

The Society of Dilettanti

6 Kinds of Public

Randall Szott, big-D Democrat and small-r republican, on art and citizenship

The Robber Bridegroom

Love letter to a house

“Liminal Space” and Aesthetics as a Practice of Individual Responsibility

Robin James sees corporations monetize liminal space—an eerie vibe and a state of systemic failure—and then sell you a way out of it, turning empty public space into private crises.

Promenade

In "Promenade," this issue's ekphrasis, Jameson Fitzpatrick responds to one of Chris Antemann's porcelain sculptures, Boudoir (2011), in a poem that meditates on the ambiguities of misaligned desires and the problems of aesthetics.

Abortion Aesthetics (Part 2)

The images are of individual entities, but they are about family.

It’s Not Right But It’s Okay

looking at postmortem photographs

The Monthly Ekphrastic

The Peaceable Kingdom

Children and Choices

The Meanings of Inoculation

Still Life with Apples, Paul Cézanne, 1898

A (light, quiet, fruitful) ekphrastic poem by Lena Moses-Schmitt, prompted by Cézanne's "Still Life with Apples" (1898) (cylinder, cone, sphere).

Minnesota Fine: Hell in a Handbasket

I curate children's parties

Notes on Hedda Hopper

A letter from the editors (but shh, you didn't hear it from us)

Notes on Clubs

A letter from the editors

“Islamic” Curatorial Futures in Two Parts

But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise

Notes on Definitive Guide

A letter from the editors.

Fallen Fruit

An Interview

Minnesota Fine: Travails of an Art Admin

just another cog in the Grain Belt machine

Rethinking the Creative Class

Toward Creative Resistance

Gossip Goals: A Quiz

Catherine Weingarten helps you pinpoint your style of gossip.

Notes on Republican Speech

A letter from the editors

A Wrinkle in Time

the Horniman walrus and colonial legacy

Minor Victories: Labor Exploitation and the “Affirmation Trap”

Sarah Jaffe on Donald Trump's Rust Belt "Mission Accomplished" moment and the need for a struggle where “we need not affirm our own exploitation to justify our existence.”

Monthly Ekphrastic

Constantin Brancusi’s The Miracle (Seal [1])

Rise of the Fallen Wife Guy

Lily Sparks’s scathing takedown of the fallen wife guy uncovers the true transgression of the Instagram husband writ large: his reckless destruction of his once-profitable image.

Notes on Plot

A letter from the editors

Re-Enacting Whiteness

Lincoln's Springfield funeral

Merchandizing the Void

Kelly Pendergrast on Khloé Kardashian's massive stage set of a home pantry, grids, spreadsheets, and the wife as home manager.

Critical Feelings

feely feelings

liberation is never still (?)

LJ Roberts on gay clubs, Stonewall, and the choreography of monument bodies

You're Gonna Like The Way You Look

What is the difference between a fop and a dandy?

“My Birth Is Your Birth”: Gossips, MeToo, and Feminist Speculation

Wendy Vogel traces the history of the term "gossip," reflecting on how its origins have shaped the collective understanding of whisper networks and #MeToo.

Dame Ethel Smyth

Feminine/Feminist Composer

Emotional Culture and 9/11

emotional culture is everything we do

When is Resistance Right?

Kristina Gaddy on the Edelweiss Pirates, protesting for fossil fuel divestment at Harvard and Yale, and resistance that doesn't look like resistance.

Rites and Wrongs: Burial After Violence

handling criminal bodies

Galentine's Day

There are lots of way to "girl."

A Lock of Hair, a Bite of Fruit

Sexual Economics in Goblin Market

Can Pop Save Us All?

critical body-listening

Spiritual Principles and Laboratory Work

The Wondrous History of Alchemy

On Memes and Movements and Moving Home

Christine Elliott on memetic structures, digital literacy, and the in-joke quality of OK Boomer.

PINtimidation

Madeleine Albright's Accessories

Call for Submissions: A Spectre Is Haunting…

Call for Submissions for Dilettante Army's Spring 2022 issue, "A Spectre is Haunting..."

Denial of Death?

The moral discourse on "the good death."

Sandwich Board Artist

Sandwich board parade

Death, Technology, and the “Return to Nature”

The influence of Romantic philosophy in the funeral industry

Monthly Ekphrastic

GIF from Alice Suret-Canale’s Hour Hour Minute Minute

Signs of Winter

It is raining again

Radically Different: A Conversation With Anayvette Martinez

An interview with Anayvette Martinez, co-founder of Radical Monarchs–a scouting troop that centers the experiences of young girls of color

Florine and the Three Worlds

The magical transference of a Florinesque atmosphere

Notes on Two Kinds of People

A letter from the editors.

The Internet is Trying to Make You Cry

cloyingly sweet internet detritus

Finding Ferguson in Visual Culture

lynching photographs and Michael Brown

Psychic Violence

the Hauntings of Sarah Winchester

Treasonous Transmissions

electronic presence and Clue

The End of Abundance: Water Infrastructure and the Culture of Cornucopianism

Jason M. Kelly writes on the freshwater crisis of the Anthropocene, designing water infrastructure for "peak use," and the narrative of green lawns.

AHS: My Roanoke Nightmare

and our Incoherent Understanding of Trump Voters

Making Critical, Ethical Software

Plotting ethical data points in Caroline Sinders's Feminist Data Set

Hans in Luck

Those Grimm brothers were hard on horses

Two Kinds of Poems

Jane Yeh and Stephanie Burt double down on Claude Cahun in "Self-Portrait as a Double Exposure" and "Mondegreens."

Ghost

How I Learned About White Feminism

Promeneur

walking, weaving, wandering

Summer Fruit

Dilettante Army's first quarterly issue

Befriending Traumatic Ontology

the post-traumatic “sixth sense”

Call for Submissions: OK Boomer

Open submissions for Winter 2020

Preserving Culture

or a Brief History of the Jackalope

From Hopper’s Hollywood to Trump’s America

Hedda Hopper used gossip to further a racist and nativist political agenda—a form expanded in the recent rise of right-wing media. Historian Jennifer Frost reconsiders her work on Hedda Hopper in light of Hopper's ideological heir, Donald Trump.

Abortion Aesthetics (Part 1)

intimidated into turning away

Toxic Nationalist Metaphors

ice cream cones in the sun

Notes on Creaks & Cricks

A letter from the editors

DIS/CREDITED

the erasure of women's creative work

“This Little Trixie”

Zachary Tavlin explores gossip's utopian and dystopian possibilities through the story of Barbara Payton, notoriously hounded by mid-century gossip columnists, Hopper and Louella Parsons among them. Gossip is, in his account of Payton's misadventures, an equivocal way of building social cohesion, for good and ill.

Notes on The World Aloft

A letter from the editors.

Unruly

Hair, Politics and Memorial

Cabinets of Curiosities

Wonder in Four Objects

Bake Sales

Domestic Labor and Julia Turshen's Feeding the Resistance

Dogs and Racism in America

On Viciousness

Call for Submissions: Creaks & Cricks

Open submissions for Fall 2019

Wigs and Tories

The Shallow Brilliance of Colley Cibber

Truth to [Marriage] Materials

Sometimes you just have to let clay be clay

Beyond Representation: Trans Embodied Methodologies

Ace Lehner on trans embodiment: a movement not from one end of the gender binary to the other, but further into oneself.

The Monthly Ekphrastic

Jessi Reaves’s Watertight Shelf With Zippers

To Bake a Hummingbird Cake

female food blogging and whiteness

Absolute Beginners: On Re-Skilling Music Instruction Books

Music instruction books pack their pages with notes on how to stand and how to arrange your face—Christopher Reeves listens instead to an array of modernist artists who resist this "meticulous meshing" with the instrument in favor of experimental performance.

Cooking with Class

A Little French

Call for Submissions: The World Aloft

Open submissions for Fall 2020

Things Found in the Bottom of Purses

Loose change from four countries

Monthly Ekphrastic

Nora Jane Slade's What

more and more of its meaning eroded away with every click

more and more of its meaning eroded away with every click

This House Is Still Haunted: An Essay In Seven Gables

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

The Overconfidence Man

Emily Ogden discovers a new kind of guy, one of the crucial archetypes of our age of grift and graft—he is the hero of his own life. Exceptional! Unimpeachable!

Shriek When the Pain Hits

Form, Feeling, and Violence in the Inflammatory Essays

Dilettante Battles

Francis Dashwood

A Series of Unfortunate Events

A Reflection on Adultism

Pop Star Avatars

A spectre is haunting the contemporary music video–the spectre of the featured artist.

Cooking with Class

Relational Recipes

Britney Spears: American Transcendentalist

light, love, flying, truth, faith

He Said, She Said

a quiz

Ritual, Repetition, Mourning: Part 2

rows upon rows of dead birds

Double-Shift: Dialectic of the Tradwife

For six decades, fanatical Andelinians all around the world have preached—and monetized—a self-help doctrine of uxorial mortification, self-infantilization, and husband-worship. Sophie Lewis explains.

Dick Pics for Sacred Healing

A Meditation on the Provenance of Objects

Against the Wife: Abolishing Romance and Family, Practicing Disability Love-Politics

Jina B. Kim asks: Why does disability crop up as the antithesis of romance, desire, and long-term fulfillment—as something to perhaps be endured in the name of love, but never anything that might re-shape how we approach love and romance in the first place?

Where to Put a Dead Painting

a methods section for the catalog raisonné

Notes on A Spectre Is Haunting…

A spectre is haunting this issue—the spectre of Marx.

Watch Your Language

A Quiz

Soviet Salon

Dinner on the Centenary of the Russian Revolution

Wedding Cake Toppers: Miniatures, Excess, and Fantasy

Kendall deBoer writes what may be the first critical history of wedding cake toppers, tying frilly white doves and normative bride-and-groom couples to feminist art and DIY craft practices that offer opportunities for creativity and fantasy.

Installing the Surface into Space

a floating eye observing distanced objects

Call for Submissions: Conditions on the Ground

Open submissions for Winter 2021

The Primal Urge to POST

social currency and trauma

The Monthly Ekphrastic

Martha Friedman’s Two Person Operating System

Queer Archives Interview: BGSQD and Lesbian Herstory Archives

In conversation, Greg Newton and Deborah Edel discuss the archives and spaces that facilitate queer knowledge-making.

Monthly Ekphrastic

Albert Bierstadt’s Mount Hood

For Those Who Talk Back

Aram Han Sifuentes's "wild tongue" protects her neighbors from ICE

#CrowdedField

Roopa Vasudevan's Twitter-generated campaign signs for 2020 Democratic candidates

Condition Report

A spectre is haunting the archive—the spectre of erasure.

Monthly Ekphrastic

Photograph from Robert Frank’s London/Wales

Call for Submissions: Weak Aesthetics

Call for Submissions for Dilettante Army's Winter 2022 issue, "Weak Aesthetics."

The Loud Silence of Monuments

Courtney R. Baker on the semiotics of Confederate monuments and the scale of artistic response

Art Workers

Siân Evans interviews guards at the Baltimore Museum of Art about their show Guarding the Art, union organizing, and the categories that management imposes on art workers.

More Than Just a Prison

Ai Weiwei's @Large

Marx for Cats

A spectre is haunting Marxism—the spectre of a cat.

The Mechanical Age

automata and the uncanny

Approach

Jessica Smith's ekphrastic response to Käthe Kollwitz's Mother with her Dead Son

Monthly Ekphrastic

Jitish Kallat’s Annexation

Black Cloud (after Sarah Anne Johnson)

A painting of a kitchen; a black cloud in the air; the words that form it

Clubhouse Excavation: The United Order of Tents

Urban archeologist Kelly M. Britt and United Order of Tents member Essie E. Gregory tell the history and plan the future of one of the United States's first fraternal orders for Black women

Hiatus: A letter from the editors

Due to Covid-19, Dilettante Army is on hiatus until Fall 2020.

Puritan Name Game

Subtlety is for sinners.

Beyond the Detail

censorship at the Gwangju Biennale

On the Traumatic Messaging of Racist Fear

trauma, post-memory, and the origins of racist fear

Small Ways to Keep Ourselves Whole

Carrie Allison's visual essay on beadwork and the closely-observed colors of plants in Nova Scotia: persistent griefs and small joys.

This Bridge Called the System: An Interview with Stephanie Morningstar

Irvin J. Hunt talks to Stephanie Morningstar about Black, Brown, and Indigenous land stewardship, eco-grief, and how NEFOC is bending the system on its back.

The Glass Coffin

Not as creepy as it sounds

On Intimacy: An Interview with Chloë Bass

In conversation with Dilettante Army, artist Chloë Bass talks about her work on intimacy and its growing scales of partnership, group, and institution.

Napoleon Salon

Dinner in the First Empire

Ask Fortunato!

Katie Naum imagines what it’s like to live (and die) with a literal crick in the neck, dispensing advice via Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Cost of Living

Life Insurance and Burial in Black Chicago

Talking Talking Animals

Joni Murphy, author of Talking Animals, asks, among other things, how to write "the United States is Nazi Germany but also Iraq, as colonized by itself?”

Call for Submissions: Well, Actually

Open call for submissions to Dilettante Army's Winter 2023 issue, "Well, Actually."

Call for Submissions: Wifey

Call for Submissions for Dilettante Army's Spring 2023 issue, "Wifey."

Hollow Hallows

getting creepy

Notes From Saturday Errands

Objects' origins and meanings

Creativity at the Frontiers

Excavating the Rural

Monthly Ekphrastic

Pablo Gonzalez’s Dog and Squirrel Mural

Notes on Conditions on the Ground

A letter from the editors.

There Are Two Kinds of People

"But consider the jellied eel..." Ben Wurgaft takes on typologies of taste with gusto.

Race to the Periphery

photography at the Olympics

It's in the Cloud

Miasma, Healthcare.gov, and Computing

Ritual Repetition, Mourning: Part 1

Rows upon rows of dead birds

The Man’s Definitive Guide to the Female Orgasm

In an essay about guides to women’s orgasm in the form of sex manuals directed at heterosexual men, Adora Svitak examines the wish for a reproducible, mechanical way of producing orgasm.

Young-Girls in Wikiland

Anna and Ellen Ioanes document the changing meaning of the word "aesthetic" reflected in the evolution of Aesthetics Wiki's moderators and users: a practice of identity-making in an era of neoliberalism. From this encyclopedia, we come to recognize a fully realized style when we see it: something that is just so aesthetic.

From Ponte de Dom Luis

An ekphrastic poem by Yanyi: a sestina prompted by an OK Boomer meme.

Visions of Eden

The State of Nature as Idyll

Notes on Mission Accomplished

A letter from the editors.

Plots in Gardens

The delightful and esoteric narratives of 16th c. Mannerist water features

Good Immigrant, Bad Immigrant: Visa Regulation and Racialization

Nara Roberta Silva on onerous US visa regulations, the liberal mythology of a "nation of immigrants," and racialization as state-making.

The Other Dilettante Army

porn and the Other

Virtual Burial Plots: A Conversation between Kelly Christian and Jed Brubaker

A conversation about Facebook legacy pages and what happens to our data after we die

Whose Haunting Who?

A spectre is haunting craft—the spectre of modernism.

all we did for the moon / New Rural Landscapes

Asiya Wadud's ekphrastic poem "all we did for the moon / New Rural Landscapes," after Alessandro Poli and Superstudio's photomontage "New Rural Landscapes"

Success Sans Tragedy

the Story of Katy Perry

Brechtian Sensibilities in Twin Peaks

"The evils that men do."

Two Poems

Anjuli Raza Kolb's two poems, “9/11 poem" and "Qur’anic Asterisk," about the difficult materiality of memory and the delicacy, humor, and eros that somehow survive, even in damaged life.

The Grotesque

Mischief and Wonder in Renaissance Art

Creek

Silvina López Medin's ekphrastic poem in response to Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Creek), from Mendieta's Earth Bodies series.

Zombie Flaneur

He was cultured. He had taste. He had time.

Windows on Other Cultures?

Western museums and native voices

Lend Me Your Geometries

A.V. Marraccini on Christopher Wren, Restoration London, city planning, fires, Riemann curvatures, the persistence of history, Japanese Metabolist architecture, Agnes Martin, grids, and other things that are or are not a torus.

Ambiguous Maps and Border Shadows

the difference between a border and the borderlands

“Who Is You?”

The Posthumanism of Moonlight

Dilettante Battles

Earl of Middlesex

A Lost Plot: Paradise

The long literary history of walled gardens

Standing Closer to the Shadows

A spectre is haunting ordinary life—the spectre of institutional decay.

Monthly Ekphrastic

Opening of Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound

Way-Finding: Guidebooks For Survival

Chenoa Baker drives through two Pittsburgh exhibitions on The Green Book and other Black guidebooks, tracing the community knowledge used by individual navigators for a multiplicity of Black experience.

Tupac Hologram

Who says I'm dead?

The Christmas Bush

Family. America. Freedom.

Letter from the Editors

Winter 2020

GIFs in the Genome: Francis Crick, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Photographic Frame

Molly Kottemann on storing GIFs in a DNA archive, framing living things, and the structure and sequence of information flow

Designing History at the Smithsonian

Architecture at NMAAHC

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