Back in our CovCol days, Noel and I lived on halls in the same dorm that had (helpfully, for our purposes) proclaimed themselves to be “brother and sister halls.” This was a nice idea. Under the guise of spirituality-glazed affection, it gave some members of each hall their most regular and sustained contact with folks of the opposite sex. Occasionally, Second South would grow distracted by the bright young things on Third South or Third Central would saucily invite Sutherland to dinner. But, in a rather impressive commitment to hall-to-hall fidelity, Second South and Third Central managed, overall, to maintain this purported “brother-sister” relationship.

Clearly, this racket worked out well for us.

When Noel and I got married, I was ushered into a sub-coterie of Second South: Manville. The Manville boys were a big part of our lives in Chattanooga. We ate Sunday suppers and watched soccer together. Noel and I counseled several of them through relationship beginnings, endings, and false starts.

Noel, meanwhile, became privy to the energetic, and generally loud emotional lives of some of my Roomates in the Lord. On occasion, he was asked to speak in defense of his entire gender. He remained unperturbed when Rachel and I would dissolve into tearful messes on his couch. He didn’t understand the girls, per se, or why the decibel level needed to be so high, but he loved them because of what they meant to me.

This weekend is the third Second South + Third Central marriage in the last four years and the second Manville + Roommates in the Lord wedding. Brien and Kelly’s wedding weekend extravaganza in Ft. Lauderdale is bringing together some of the people who know me best and who are dearest to my heart. It’s a family reunion, of sorts: two unrelated but tightly bound groups of friends who have history, traditions, and plans for the future.

In our card for Kel and Brien, we’ll tell them how precious this group of friends have been and how delightful it is to have them joined together, again.

Because, like your mother-in-law told you, you don’t marry a person.

You marry the family.

Things I am not doing this summer include: taking a language class, writing a chapter, and spending inordinate amounts of time in the library.

Things I am doing this summer include: helping plan two weddings and execute four, watering my garden, remembering why I love contemporary art, traveling, assembling friends’ Ikea dresser, getting a piercing, eating as many meals as possible in my backyard, learning about hospitality, learning about twitter, trimming a chapter into an article, researching evidence of ethnic profiling in World War II visual culture, and running 6 miles.

Yay.

A few trees later, my thesis has bee submitted to my committee. I am defending this week Wednesday at 12:30.

Shortly, I will be nervous about my defense, anxious about talking to three really excellent professors about this half book that I just wrote. But right now, I am triumphant.

It is telling of my weakness that brief, punchy criticism directed towards my abilities in a none-too-important quadrant of my life can swiftly debilitate me. The specifics of the criticism were really immaterial; all I took away was a panicking sense of self-doubt, a questioning of my calling, and the impulse to cry any time someone asked me about my MA thesis.

Sometimes I have days or weeks that remind me of particular artists. I’ve had Fred Tomaselli days where everything seems like a fascinating, jubilant burst of colorful bits. I have had Kiki Smith weeks, where I am acutely aware of the aches and longings of those hurting around me. I have had Lorna Simpson days where the lingering, haunting effects of our culture’s past wrongs ask to be mourned. I’ve even had Marcel Duchamp days where life is just…wackier. (I can’t really say that I’ve ever had a Rubens day, though. I’m not sure what that would entail.)

The last five days — feeling incapable, fearful, and insubstantial — have been part of an Eva Hessa kind of week.

Working in New York through the sixties, Hesse worked both within and against the dominant minimalist aesthetic, creating works that toyed with materials and with its relationship to the viewer. Her works often projected out into the viewer’s space, blurring the demarcations between painting and sculpture, object and environment. Many of Hesse’s works, particularly in the late sixties, used new industrial – and dangerous – materials such as latex and fiberglass to create sculptural works which were powerful in their fragility. This work, Rope Piece from 1970, is a drooping, amorphous installation that evokes the body with a minimalist nod. Looped and dangling, the rope somehow still suggests a body.

My own body, while so tense from the stress of the last few days, recognizes itself here. It’s a body aware of weakness, a body on the brink of tears. My fear of others’ opinions — and thus my frequent forgetting of my freedom in Christ — can cripple me. I transpose the criticism of one area onto the substance of my very calling. Should I be in grad school? Should I be writing a thesis? Is my work meaningful? Original? Substantial? Why can’t I write a normal sentence?

With a sister in Darfur and a sister-to-be who is under great expectations, this existential crisis over my academic ability seems rather silly. To some extent, surely it is.

Yet the beautiful thing about Eva Hesse weeks is that I am also reminded of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the Word becoming a tired, broken body. It is God being born in bloody straw, sweating as he walked, needing naps, crying bitterly. The Incarnation is the God giving dignity to particulars, saying “yes” to the importance of form and flesh and sight. The Incarnation is the reason my unsteady heart and welling fear need not paralyze me. And the Incarnation reminds me why this is my kingdom calling in the first place.

I have a deeply conflicted relationship with seasons. As a little girl, I loved a particular children’s book that existed for the sole purpose of teaching kids seasons. Living in a seasonless climate myself, it seemed like the book was describing a fantastic, made-up world. I memorized a seasonal calendar from that book. December through February was winter, and everything was blanketed in snow and fringed with icicles. March through May was spring, with blossom-covered trees and flowers that didn’t grow in Hawaii. June through August was summer, full of green grass, sunshine, and ice cream cones. And September through November was fall, with brightly colored leaves, apples, pumpkins, and, uh, plaid skirts. I was utterly taken. When we had to draw pictures of heaven for Sunday School, I drew a sprawling landscape where each quadrant of heaven boasted a different season: snow by the pearly gates, summer by the Tree of Life, autumn by the streets of gold, and spring with a lion and lamb. Yes, I was a dedicated seasonophile.

Then, I moved to the mainland and was forced to face the sad reality that seasons are not idyllic end-to-end. On some level, that children’s book month-by-month breakdown of seasons has remained with me, and I tend towards bitterness when the weather doesn’t follow the prescribed pattern.

Take today, for instance. It is March. My childhood education taught me that March is spring. There should be chicks and daffodils and baby rabbits. And yet, in reality, today looks like this:

On a rational level, I can accept that months are mere guides to the fluctuating whims of seasonal weather. And yet… it’s March, and that deeply ingrained belief in seasonal order rebels. Be spring, weather, be spring! How can I “spring forward” this Sunday if there is still snow on the ground, signifying winter? How can Banana Republic cruelly show me pictures of women traipsing about in cotton skirts when I cannot step foot outdoors without a coat?

Thankfully, this is one complaint that can be easily toppled through the aesthetic delight that made me a seasonophile in the first place. It’s cold, but at least it’s pretty:

Update:

Update:

Dr. Paul Morton ranks among my favorite professors at Covenant. Besides being a tremendous history teacher, speaking in eminently quotable phrases, and dealing with college politics exclusively through the lens of sarcasm, Dr. Morton also had a remarkably specific code of dress.

On the days when he wasn’t wearing a sweater vest, he would stride into class clad entirely in a single color. He wore black, of course, like the erudite intellectual that he is. A black turtleneck, slightly faded black pants, a black belt, black socks, and black shoes. Sometimes he chose brown as the color of the day: a chocolate button-down, brown trousers, and coordinating belt and shoes. He wore a cream-and-khaki ensemble, too, and that one played with texture; the cable knit of the ivory sweater vest playing off of the khaki twill and cream jersey turtleneck.

Not that the man was afraid of color. He owned forest green pants around which he built a truly amazing outfit. He had kidney-bean colored pants, too. And while I occasionally cringed when his shades of olive green inhabited the shadowlands of neither-matching-nor-contrasting, I admired his commitment. Not everyone can pull off 6′4″ of eggplant.

But today I read a New York Magazine profile on New Yorkers who wear a single color — and not black — exclusively. My favorite was Elizabeth Sweetheart, a fabric designer who is deeply, passionately dedicated to kelly green.

I guess Dr. Morton has a ways to go before he can count himself among the truly color-committed.

On Friday night I saw the writing on the wall… and it was mine.

It is a strange sensation to walk into a museum — a real museum, not Covenant’s Art Barn — and see one’s own words plastered on the wall. It is even stranger to see well-appointed museum donors, art history department professors, and unsuspecting members of the public intently reading those words so seriously.

Should I caution them? Should I warn them that those imperious museum object labels that appear so definitive and confident were written by… a grad student? Should I sidle up and ask if it makes sense?

Last semester, I interned for the dean of the Sam Fox School of Art and Design as he curated his exhibition On the Margins, a show of (very!) contemporary art which explores themes of war, disaster and displacement. I functioned largely as a research assistant, compiling files on each of the artists and artworks, assembling an annotated bibliography for sources dealing with visual depictions of war and disaster, composing artist biographies for the exhibition catalogue and writing wall text.

While the act of writing artist biographies and wall text is not in and of itself exhilarating, the payoff is — as this weekend proved — rather extraordinary. First off, it makes for a nice line on the good ol’ professional curriculum vitae. Second, wealthy museum donors invite you to quite lovely private receptions where you will be fed bacon-wrapped scallops, mini crab cakes, and excellent wine. Third, you get invited to tag along with the artists who come into town for the exhibition opening. This means that you get to go on a private tour of the Putlizer Foundation’s Dan Flavin exhibition with Mrs. Pulitzer, assorted area curators, and artists Willie Doherty, Willie Cole, Jane Hammond, and Thaddeus Stroud. It’s all very surreal.

Also, you feel slightly obligated to wear more black than usual so you can fit in with the curators.

The moral of the story, dear reader and visitor-of-museums, is that you should never fully entrust yourself to the wall text. It may have been written by a grad student who just needed to get a good meal.

I’ve stopped apologizing for long gaps in my blogging attempts. When writing fancy academic things is your daily grind, it can be hard to code switch to witty, more public-friendly banter. So, good visual culture historian that I am, here are roughly the equivalent of seven thousand words, summarizing my winter break and subsequent return to the hallowed pink granite halls of learning:

Week 1:

Not yet free, I grade final exams where students tell me ridiculous things about Manet.

Week 2:

St. Louis has its biggest snow since ancient times. I am addicted to making snow angels and singing along to Over the Rhine’s Christmas album.

Week 3:

In the culinary paradise of my in-laws’ home in Houston, my sisters and I create a veritable masterpiece: a gingerbread savannah. In 3-d.

Week 4:

I grow deeply attached to my Christmas gift: riding boots.

Week 5:

Home.

Week 6:

We get our very own Roomba. Suddenly, we come home to a clean rug every day. Lives change. The faint sound of rejoicing angels is heard.

Week 7:

I get my thesis chapter back from my adviser, begin TAing for Intro to Modern, clean out the basement, return to choir, and finally get a Missouri driver’s license. But perhaps most importantly, I realize that my Mac’s Photobooth application got an upgrade with Leopard.

Huzzah! I am 58 pages closer to a graduate degree in Contemporary Art and Theory.

Four days ago, my dining room floor looked like this:

When I taught writing at Cov, I would occasionally frighten hapless students by whipping out a pair of scissors and announcing that we were going to cut up their essays. I am a big believer in slicing up essays. In real life. There is something so productive and material and satisfying about physically playing with the order of an essay that even Microsoft Word’s scissor icon can’t quite approximate.

After a satisfying round with my scissors, some tape, and scrap paper, things started to come together:

Yay. The final few projects of the semester seem far more manageable after taming this beast.

A few days ago, Noel forwarded me an e-mail relaying key information about his upcoming company Christmas party.

All,
The attire for the Holiday party is any of the following… Festive, After-Five, Business Casual, (No Jeans Please)

To me, this this dress code is, indeed, inscrutable. Having chosen the life and career path that leads through the extended labyrinths of academia, where professors dress in anything from turtlenecks with gypsy skirts to full-body ensembles in eggplant. Occasionally, there is a sweater vest involved. Also, mismatched earrings.

Emerging from this context, these random and randomly capitalized words — “Festive,” “After Five,” “Business Casual” — seem obtuse, exclusionary, and even foreboding. Had I not done my research on Google, I may have assumed that “Festive” would be fulfilled by wearing something like:

Turns out, “Festive” is just code for “sparkly.” A shiny blouse, some sort of extravagant bling, a sequin or two. It remains unclear if this reported definition of “Festive” means Noel should wear something like this:

“After Five” is also problematic. To simply declare a particular type of attire “After Five” presumes a hegemonic consensus on what one wears post-five o’clock. What about class? What about race? What about gender? It’s colonial, really. And, should you be wondering, at this time of year, after I finish with school, I am most likely to be wearing this after five:

And, judging from extant literature on the subject (which is how we roll in grad school), the definition of “Business Casual” is still fraught. Even Noel’s company cannot trust its employees to correctly interpret the coded phrase without the helpful parentheses: “(No jeans).” If business folks don’t know what it means then, really, how much hope can I really have?

On the other hand, given the sheer range of formality and, um, tastefulness, of attire at last year’s party, perhaps giving a suggested attire — no matter how inscrutable — is still an improvement.

Now to go buy that elf costume…