| |  Illustration by Chrissy Curtin | There is an aquarium scene in 2012’s Rust and Bone wherein Marion Cotillard, playing a woman (Stephanie) who has lost both legs to an orca accident at a sea park, goes back to visit the killer whale. She stands in front of the tank — soaked with blue — the prosthetic ankles of her new legs firmly planted into her sneakers. She uses her palm to softly smack the glass once and then again to call the whale over to her. She holds both hands up, touching the glass the same way she would touch the whale, if she only could. She nods and the whale moves its head in a nodding fashion. She takes her right arm and lifts it, points, and the whale swims away, the scene not ending until the last flick of its slick black tail disappears. In the scene preceding the aquarium one, Stephanie is on her balcony in her wheelchair, doing the same semaphore-like arm motions to Katy Perry's “Firework” that she did before the accident. It, like the aquarium scene, is a scene of both hope and sadness. Healing and wonderfully human moments in a movie that also has scenes of such intense, devastating violence. I had to close my eyes. Though I was blown away by Cotillard’s performance, in truth, I only watched Rust and Bone originally because of Matthias Schoenaerts, the actor who works alongside her. I have a crush on him. My celebrity crushes are emotional rescue when the world is too much. Like a security blanket or a warm mug of tea, they serve a right, proper, selfish purpose — one piece of the puzzle to your girl’s chill, emotional well-being. I tend to watch movies in batches, in organized, themed groups. Like the books I choose to read, I most often watch movies for the actors/characters and not the plot, although there are plenty of exceptions. But as pretty much a life rule, whenever I fall in love with someone (new to me) on my screen, I will go back and watch most (if not all) of their movies. And this time, it’s Matthias Schoenaerts. *** I’ve had plenty of crushes in my lifetime, both real and celebrity. When I was a little girl, I had a crush on the boy up the street who cut the grass with his shirt off. His name started with a T, and he was older than me. I can no longer picture his face, but it was the idea of teenage T, shirtless, riding the push mower that I liked. I couldn’t have been any older than ten and had absolutely no clue what sex was or what my feelings were, but I liked looking out the car window when we drove past his house and seeing him out in the yard. I liked thinking about him. That’s most of what it comes down to for me: what I like thinking about. A way to curb my anxiety and anxious thoughts. You could be mine, could be mine, could be mine, all mine. Right? *** Matthias Schoenaerts is an incredible actor, and also easy on the eyes. He’s very pretty, handsome, manly, sexy, handsome, sexy, manly, wow OK yes exactly, etc. He has a great nose, a great walk. He looks really good with a beard and bed-head. He looks fetching in scarves and sweaters. He tends to play characters who are complicated, quiet, and dark. Characters I maybe shouldn’t root for, characters I should probably hate but don’t. Like in Rust and Bone, he plays Ali, a knucklehead. A boxer/brawler type who has recently come into custody of his five-year-old son. Ali is not a good father. He is neglectful and violent. Should it surprise us when he is so tender with Stephanie? Brutal tenderness and tender brutality are common threads running through Schoenaerts’s work, so much so that for a while he had those phrases listed as his Instagram bio. Ali is physically tender with Stephanie in a way he is not with his own son. There’s a scene of him carrying her into the ocean for a swim, of her hitching a ride on his back on the way out. But when it comes to her heart and feelings, he is brutish. He unapologetically sleeps with other women, takes them home right in front of her. He treats her no differently than he would treat any other woman. Meaning also that he could disappear without a trace, without letting her know he’s leaving. When Stephanie wonders whether sex is the same now that she’s lost her legs, Ali casually asks her if she wants to have sex with him. To try it out. Just to see. Once, after sex, he carries her into the bathroom to pee. *** Some of my real-life crushes amounted to absolutely nothing. One crush was an awful idea and led to an emotionally abusive relationship. One crush ended up being my boyfriend for about a year and is still my friend. Another became a boy I’d kiss whenever we were alone. We’d be walking with a group, we’d fall behind, he’d grab me, and we’d kiss against a stranger’s car in the parking lot. We kissed in a pickup truck in the alley behind the coffee shop, listening to Doggystyle. We kissed when it was snowing, listening to Vs by Pearl Jam. He was never my boyfriend-boyfriend. *** In his movies, Matthias is frequently shot from behind, the back of his head gently bobbing as he walks away from the camera. Mysterious. He shows his ass in a lot of his movies. Some call him the Belgian Brando, and like Brando, his body is important to his body of work, in a way that isn’t true of all actors. He’s usually cast as a taciturn brawler, some kind of protector — a bodyguard, a spy. His quietude is an asset to his characters who are so often paranoid, shattered. In Suite Française, he plays a German soldier who has to do unthinkable, unspeakable things, and he is unsurprisingly reserved, brooding. Brutal. The German soldier is also a pianist, a composer. Tenderness. In Disorder, he plays an ex-soldier with PTSD now moonlighting on a security team. Kavinsky-like ’80s video-game music lends an electric, anxious pulse to the movie. His character is easily unnerved by almost anything and removes his earpiece when the constant voices and buzzing are too much. Matthias's love interests in these films are often just out of reach — foreplay without completion or mindless casual hookups with no real emotion (from him). In Bullhead, he plays a man with no testicles who injects himself with testosterone every day. In Far From the Madding Crowd, he plays the dreamy, hulking shepherd Gabriel Oak and is near the woman he loves, but she is always looking at someone else until she finally sees him. In A Bigger Splash, his idyllic, sexually satisfying relationship on the volcanic island of Pantelleria is interrupted in the worst way when his lover’s ex comes to visit and overstays his welcome. *** Once upon a time, I had a crush on the boy who would become my husband. A bevy of girls at our high school had a crush on him. We called him the black-haired beauty and would watch him smoke before school and skateboard after. He always wore the same dark-green hoodie and a carnelian ring that clicked when he moved his fingers a certain way. Irresistible. My favorite boy, favorite kisser. Mmm: Yes, you could be mine, tonight and every night. Done and done. Not to brag, but I’m a pro at crushing. And now, all my crushes are trapped behind the glass of my TV screen. *** I’ll be your savior, steadfast and true
I’ll come to your emotional rescue *** Onscreen, the characters Matthias Schoenaerts plays may be dangerous, the stories may be dark, but from a distance, my crush heart is protected. All my celeb crushes are safe, calming places I keep coming back to in my brain. It’s more satisfying than lust; I can hold my thoughts captive. But the familiarity or even the idea of a singular person or character provides a simple, soothing sweetness. The world is a mess, but my Matthias Schoenaerts movies stay the same. Even if only for a little bit, they are a balm, an escape. Like listening to St. Vincent cover “Emotional Rescue” by the Rolling Stones for five minutes on the Bigger Splash soundtrack. Sometimes that’s all I need — five minutes. And shamelessly, I’ll take my comforting, emotional quickies wherever I can find them. Leesa Cross-Smith is the author of Whiskey & Ribbons and Every Kiss a War. | | | | |  Illustration by Amrita Marino | I had my first taste of real romance as a sophomore at Seabreeze High School, where I dated a boy named Sean. Our relationship was seeping with sweetness. Instead of being the typical, hormonally raged teenage couple, we talked a LOT. We kissed often, held hands everywhere, and genuinely were quite innocent. When our relationship ended, it also launched a decade-plus span of not-so-innocent relationships with men who never treated me as well as Sean had. Much of that time was spent in the pursuit of worthiness; I married a man who I thought was smart and interesting, and I wanted to be his ideal woman. It stung when he told me my legs looked like “tree trunks” and that I would never truly have an athletic body because some people just aren’t made that way — even though, at the time, I was working out consistently, at minimum two to three hours a day, because I was a competitive triathlete. I valued my core strength and six-pack. My husband’s comments intensified my body-image issues and drove me headlong toward an eating disorder. I would ask my husband to tell me he loved me, and he would question why I needed to hear it so often. The truth was that I needed to hear it because I could feel it slipping away. I began working out incessantly again and making sure for every calorie in, I spent it in exercise. Soon, he found me remarkably attractive and wanted to have sex with me on a regular basis. He complimented my body daily. But one day, we went to marriage counseling, and the therapist asked what it was that he loved about me. He couldn’t answer at first. Eventually he broke the silence, gazed at me, and just said, “I do love you. I’m just not sure how to answer that question now.” And I was crushed. I realized that love couldn’t be created through my skinny body. Sex could not heal that hole in my heart formed by knowing I wasn’t truly loved as his wife. It was time for both of us to move on. Seventeen years after high school, Sean and I reconnected, and sparks went crazy. It was such a relief to feel the true connection we had — mind, body, and spirit. My body-image issues resolved. I didn’t feel like I had to exercise off every calorie I consumed, and it was OK if my “not so perfect” legs were not only exposed but shown off in a dress! Best of all, I felt confident in myself and our relationship. When our first Valentine’s Day back together arrived, he gave me a huge bouquet that was not full of roses; rather, he researched many varieties of flowers and their meanings and thoughtfully put together a bouquet that encapsulated his feelings for me. The flowers were delivered in a big bundle, wrapped in simple brown paper, with a small note that labeled every single flower, why he chose them, and what their meanings were. I felt so grateful that this man loved me so deeply. We had the most amazing, passionate sex life. I felt powerfully beautiful in his presence. Then came the biggest test you could throw at a relationship. On October 8, 2011, while riding my bicycle home from work, I was embracing the cool fall air. Fall is the most romantic time of the year for me, the time of year when you come home from a good workout, take a hot shower, put on soft clothing, and snuggle. That’s what I was looking forward to doing that night with Sean — but it never happened. Instead, that day, a freight-truck driver ran a stop sign and literally ripped me apart, rolling over my body. My vagina, anus, stomach, hips, and entire left leg were shredded. After being resuscitated, I spent weeks in a coma and following that was left weak, needing extensive wound changes. I had a colostomy bag that made awful sounds and smells, and I felt ugly. My vagina looked like it had a cleft lip, as the entire labia was ripped off and literally stapled back on. My stomach had tire tracks across it. My once-muscular cyclist butt had been ripped from inside out and now sagged like two deflated pancakes. I feared that my husband would never look at me longingly again, let alone feeling OK about how I saw myself. I feared looking in the bathroom mirror. One day, I took a mirror to my vagina, looked at it up close, and wept. I was no longer the woman I once was. I felt disgusted looking at myself. What was I? Who was I? How could I ever make love again? Would I ever feel sexy? Adored? This was so much worse than having “tree trunk legs.” It was beyond my imagination to picture someone accepting a body like mine for long; this was never going to heal and look “normal” again. I ached with not only the physical pain but the soul-crushing feeling that I would never again measure up to all the beautiful women in the world with their unblemished bodies. I found myself bound to a hospital rehab bed for days on end, having horrific and embarrassing wound changes. Sean was right there beside me. He slept on a reclining chair every night with his arm slung over the hospital-bed rails so I could feel his warmth. There were many bumps in the road, such as when he was giving me wound changes at night before bed and I would lie on my side, sobbing, as he pulled the multiple feet of gauze from my rectum, cleaned it, then stuffed more back in with a long cotton swab. The pain was immense, as the tunnel in my back end continued closing and the nerve endings were reattaching. He was so emotional and would often lash out in anger toward the man who had run me over. At the time, I wondered if he could ever look at my backside with any sort of sexual attraction again. Prior to the trauma, our time before sleep was in loving, naked embrace under the sheets, often leading to romantic sex. Now, our pre-sleep foreplay was full of drainage pads, tears, medical gloves, blood, body fluids, and misery. But my husband, who loved me so longingly prior to the trauma and looked at me with the same eyes of love and newness as he had when he was a high-school senior, still looked at me the same way. He still kissed me the same way; he still longed to hold me and touch me. I have grown to learn that being loved, sexy, adored, and confident in my skin takes work — but not just the kind of work you can do in a gym. Seeing myself through my husband’s eyes made me value myself in new ways. My body might have been imperfect, but it was working so hard to heal. My mind might have been wracked with panic attacks, but it was already planning for a positive future. I was overtaken by gratitude for the way this man taught me not only what it felt like to be loved fiercely but how to love myself again, too. The author of Gratitude in Motion, Colleen Kelly Alexander is a lifelong athlete and motivational speaker. With her indomitable spirit and amazing story of survival, Colleen teaches others how to aim higher, be stronger, and use adversity as a catalyst to make themselves and the world better. | | | | |  Dani Roche in her Toronto studio. Photo by Neva Wireko | I grew up in Detroit and then moved to New York — so for me, a winter coat is everything. It keeps me warm and complements my outfits underneath. It needs to be both functional enough to last a few seasons and fashionable enough to survive as one of the few coats in my closet. I keep only one or two at a time, both to pare down on excess (hello, Marie Kondo!) and also save space. Which brings me to Biannual, an outerwear brand with the aim of doing it all. It was a black-and-pastel-pink color-block puffer that first drew me to the brand. The coat was oversize, with adjustable drawstrings to alter the silhouette, making it perfect for adjusting to fit a chunky sweater. And then I found out the brand was vegan and unisex with a lifetime warranty and run by a 26-year-old woman, Dani Roche — and I was hooked. Roche is no stranger to winter either, having grown up in Toronto, where the winters can be brutal. Her foray into fashion began in 2007, just when fashion blogging started gaining popularity. Roche was among the thousands posting her daily outfits on sites like MySpace and Lookbook.nu from her suburban hometown of Scarborough. Inspired by Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso, who got her start selling clothes on eBay, the then-sixteen-year-old Roche launched her own e-commerce shop, Plastic Skyline. She coded the website herself and sold a curated selection of vintage and reworked vintage that she would sew in her parents’ basement. “The shop only lasted for two and a half years, and we were mostly selling to everyone that we knew,” she told me. “The Internet was still a scary place then, and meeting people on the Internet and shipping things out just wasn’t very common.” In 2011, while studying graphic design in college (a dual program at York University and Sheridan College), she launched Kastor and Pollux, which started off as a side gig dedicated to “wearable-fashion-related things” while she held full-time jobs. But by 2016, Kastor and Pollux transformed into a digital, all-woman-run creative agency. Under the direction of Roche, the agency has worked on projects for Topshop, Estée Lauder, Fujifilm, L’Oréal, and Lululemon, and according to Canada’s Marketing magazine, it was set to bring in six figures after just one year in business. And in 2017, Roche was plucked to put her fashion knowledge and branding skills into one project as the creative director of the up-and-coming outerwear brand Biannual, which launched in September. While Roche doesn’t have an extensive background in fashion design, she comes from a crop of fashion bloggers turned social-media influencers turned entrepreneurs who use their innate understanding of the Internet to lead companies into the future (think Leandra Medine of Man Repeller, Aimee Song of Song of Style, Karla Deras of Karlas Closet, GabiFresh, and Tina Craig of BagSnob). According to the Fashion Law and L2 Digital, 91 percent of brands are using influencers in connection with their marketing strategies. Biannual’s parent company, Corwik Group, wanted to build a brand for a demographic in the sweet spot between young people who cared about the fashionable aspect of their clothing and those who cared about the company’s message, which “prioritizes consciousness” with both a social and environmental responsibility. Roche was the perfect woman for the job, even telling me that she consulted with her peers on the authenticity and wearability during the design process of the first collection.  Roche in one of Biannual's faux fur sweaters. Photo by Neva Wireko |
Biannual’s debut collection was tiny — just eight jackets, including that color-blocked puffer coat I loved so much, a reversible long wrap jacket, a faux-fur pull-over, and a sleeping-bag parka. The jackets are all oversize (to make room for layering), all unisex, and all vegan (with down made from the company’s own blend of recyclable cashmere), and the company is planning on releasing only two collections per year. Roche tells me that the brand, whose name was inspired by “biannual changes that cause us to reset and grow,” intended to make the garments multipurpose to help eliminate the need for consumers to buy a whole bunch of coats. For the reversible wrap jacket, there’s two neutral jackets in one, a sleek black and a dusty-pink one. The online description of the camo jacket touts it as being perfect for “the metro or the ski lift.” In the world of fashion blogging, excess reigns supreme. Clothes are sent out for promotion; clothes are gifted; clothes are bought over and over again. Roche knows that experience firsthand. It’s why for the past few years, she’s pared down her wardrobe and invested only in building a uniform, which largely consists of vintage finds, jeans, T-shirts, and clothing she can wear in many ways (both every day and for special occasions) and in different seasons. “I try not to buy clothes that are super-trendy, that I know I’ll get rid of in the next year,” she says. Sustainability and limiting excess aren’t always the first goals of a fashion-focused brand, whose aim is usually to literally sell more and more clothes and change with the trends. But it’s clear that Biannual is following in the footsteps of companies like Patagonia, but with the added challenge of creating clothing that’s also fashion-forward. “I think that if we’re able to start a conversation about being more aware of why we have to buy the stuff that we do, individuals can make their own purchasing decisions, and they won’t necessarily always buy into the mentality [of consuming more],” says Roche. And with Biannual, she hopes to shift the conversation forward, one oversize puffer coat at a time. Tahirah Hairston is an associate editor at Lenny who is obsessed with Patagonia’s brand motto. | | | | |  Illustration by Ghazaleh Rastgar | The morning after election night 2016, I was standing between a steel post and a baby carriage in a crowded Orange Line train in Boston, staring at my phone, when a man turned to me and said: “Go back to your country.” He was white, bigger than I, and older, in his 40s, perhaps. The train was pulling into Back Bay Station, brakes shrieking. Moments earlier, the same man had been behind me, trying to elbow me out of his way, and I’d frowned at him over my shoulder, thinking, Dude, there’s a baby carriage, do you mind? Had I not been made aware of his presence before he’d spoken, his words might have left me speechless. But my irritation had been primed by his jostling, and I heard myself shoot back: “This is my country.” The doors slid open; he surged forward with the crowd. Within seconds, he had vanished into the bustle on the platform, leaving me to face alone the confused stares coming from all sides. People around us would have heard only my words, for he had spoken softly, almost in a murmur. It was as if he were just testing the waters of that new morning, trying to gauge what he could get away with on a crowded train in a liberal-leaning city. It was as if he had been working up to this moment for months, buoyed by the rallies and the tweet storms of the past year, events that had climaxed just hours earlier and whose full meaning I returned to eventually, with glazed eyes, processing it on my phone. I’ve been wondering what made me declare, in the moment of our meeting, that this was my country, a claim I had never made before. When I introduce myself to strangers in the United States, I usually say something like: I’m from India, from Bangalore; I’ve been here fifteen years; I came when I was eighteen, for college. If they remark that I don’t speak with an accent, I’ll add that I lived in America for two years when I was a small child; that my father had a sabbatical in Dayton, Ohio, in the ’80s, and that I had learned to speak English there as a kindergartner and hence with an American accent; that we had returned to India when I was five years old, and never returned to the United States as a family. I grew up in India, I’ll insist, because I like to believe that I came to America on my own, as an adult in charge of my own decisions, that my kindergarten years in Ohio don’t count because I had no say then. The words I came to America carry for me the promise of self-discovery, the thrill of becoming the person one can be only when removed from the pressures and expectations of home. A few years ago, when I was traveling on my own in Novosibirsk, Siberia, my host asked me if my husband was Indian. “No,” I said. “He’s American.” “Ah, but what does that mean?” the Siberian said with a touch of impatience. “Anybody can be American.” What he really wanted to know was whether my husband was of Indian origin, whether I had married within or outside of my culture. I was endeared by the impatience in my host’s voice, by his notion that the title “American” was so broad in its scope, so widely accessible, that to say someone was American was to say very little. In Siberia, as in other far-flung places of the world, the idea that anybody can walk into America and become American might seem unremarkable. But within America, as I experienced on the Orange Line train that morning, the same morning that a Muslim woman riding a bus in Oregon was told by two white men that she was a terrorist and a school kid in Washington said aloud to his classmates, “If you weren’t born here, pack your bags,” the myth Anybody can be American can flip quickly to its converse: Go back to your country. *** I had heard those words once before — fifteen years before, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. I was an undergraduate freshman then, having recently re-arrived from India on a student visa. As I made my way down Market Street in Philadelphia late one October night, accompanied by ten or so other women from my college, a man shouted those words at us from a passing car. Hearing them had little effect on me; "their power was lessened by my ignorance of what a clichéd epithet it was and by my exhilaration at having arrived on my own in America. My friends and I had just been to a welcome party for international students. We’d munched cookies in a grand hall and listened to a dean make a speech, her voice booming from the loudspeakers, telling us all how lucky her university and others in Philadelphia were, how lucky America was, to have us bring our talents, our culture, and our voices from all over the world. During the dance, an inflatable, five-foot-high globe had been bounced into the hall for us to pass around. Now, out on the street, someone in my group yelled “Fuck you” to the retreating car, and we repeated the words, tossing them into the night air as blithely as we had tossed that globe, feeling invincible in our numbers, our youth, and our celebrated status as citizens of the world. *** When I came to America as a college student, I had no idea that I would stay after graduation. But I did stay. I became a fiction writer and a teacher, professions of my choosing. Had I returned to India, I would have struggled to give myself permission to write for several hours a day with no guarantee of publication, submerged in the goal-oriented, middle-class ether of my upbringing. Here in Boston, I’ve been able to labor freely at my craft. Each time I’ve asked for permission to remain in America, it has been granted. I am a permanent resident now, married to an American citizen. I benefit from the privileges offered to the educated and English-speaking and from the rights that people of color in this country have had to fight and die for. And if I do have to leave, I can return to India without fear of being killed or imprisoned, unlike the many thousands in this country, including the DREAMers, who have no such guarantee. It is a bizarre strain of cruelty for a country as vast and wealthy as the United States to consider throwing out people who have grown up here and belong nowhere else, while at the same time allowing me — someone who arrived here by choice and not by force — to stay. Such a callous distinction suggests some sort of autoimmune disease, that the unhealed and accumulated wounds of America’s history have led the country to attack itself. What I feel in common with the young unauthorized immigrants is their identity, forged in childhood, as Americans. While my memories of being a kindergartner in Dayton are vague, I know the teachers advised my parents to speak to me in English to help me pick up the language faster. I had come as an Indian kid, speaking only Tamil, and by the time we returned to India, I was an American kid, fluent in all things American: Sesame Street, Curious George, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Crayola crayons, and Oreos. My Tamil had all but evaporated. I would regain a fraction of it over the course of the next thirteen years, in Bangalore, but I would never regain a sense of belonging in India. My Indian peers teased my American accent. She’s foreign, they said gleefully, and those words imprinted on my self-image, never to leave. Long after my American accent had faded, the sense of being a foreigner, of not belonging in India — a place that was supposed to be my home — remained. When I returned to America for college, I felt an unfamiliar sense of ease. My accent came hurrying back like a long-lost friend. Anybody can be American, the Siberian said. When I think back to how I was trapped on that train, with the steel post and the man at my back and the baby carriage in front of me, I think of how I am caught between the poles Go back to your country and Anybody can be American. Over the past sixteen years, my roots in my home country have grown looser while those in America feel deep. But sometimes I wonder if I have sunk my grip into a crumbling cliff face, if it is only a matter of time before I’m told by authorities larger than the man on the train that I am not welcome here. My American roots are in my identity — the ease and confidence I have here that I never had in India. The fact that the words “This is my country” fell subconsciously from my lips rouses me as much as being told that I have no right to be here. I can no longer pretend I’m from somewhere else. America has taken me over, has taken over my reflexes, to the point that my unconscious believes I, like anybody, can be American. Shubha Sunder's stories have appeared in places like Crazyhorse, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Bangalore Review, and Narrative Magazine.* She is an associate fiction editor of* West Branch Magazine. | | | | |  Addie Wagenknecht, self portrait - as a young women after a hundred years and 12 seconds, 2017. Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York. Photo by John Berens | Addie Wagenknecht knows what the void means. By this, I mean she’s an artist who plays with absence and the inheritance we leave behind; her works are clues into the world of technology and feelings that make up her brain, but they aren’t explanations of it. That would be too easy. She builds her art in unconventional ways — hacking sculpture and robotics together to create a traditionally beautiful thing from disturbing means and creating a visually disturbing thing with traditional ones. Wagenknecht’s prior series “Black Hawk Paint” and “Internet of Things” used drones and Roombas, respectively. Her work has been featured in the Vienna, Moscow, and Istanbul biennials and acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she’s collaborated with Chanel and i-D magazine on a series exploring the sixth sense. Besides creating art exhibited around the world, she was one of the founding members of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab, who do work in cybersurveillance, research, coding, hacking, art, and theory. Her latest work, Alone Together, on view at Bitforms gallery in New York City is a series of paintings utilizing Yves Klein’s namesake blue, painted using a Roomba as a brush, letting it navigate around her nude body as she reclined on a canvas. The result is a void in the shape of a woman, painted by a robot learning the algorithm it intuited of her body. In a time where meme-based cryptocurrency is eating up the world’s entire output of energy and Trump has proposed slashing the National Endowment of the Art’s budget out of existence, urgent work discussing where our bodies belong in the future of art and tech has never felt more necessary. After seeing the show in person and missing the chance to talk with her — she was far too popular for me to wade through the bodies, pressed into the small space — we caught up (how else?) on Skype, across the world from each other, with three time zones in between.  Addie Wagenknecht, self portrait - loneliness is what we can'tdo for each other, 2017. Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York. Photo by John Berens. |
Arabelle Sicardi: Can you explain some of the choices of your show at Bitforms gallery? You used a Roomba to create this art with this magnificent Yves Klein blue. This is my favorite shade of blue. Addie Wagenknecht: The blue, or rather how the medium encapsulated the blue, was developed specifically for Yves Klein by a chemist in Paris. He had copyrighted the blue so no one else could use it, but I found the chemist store he used in Paris. They still had the resin they developed as well as the raw pigment for sale. I was fascinated that this blue was a signature of Klein’s practice where he used women as “living paintbrushes.” Women covered themselves in pigment, and their labor would be viewed in front of an audience as spectacle. A lot of these kinds of action painters have historically been white, straight, cis dudes. I was interested in negotiating or redefining something that represents the fact a body doesn’t necessarily have to serve any story but its own. AS: You have a considerable history of addressing gender and the value of bodies, and your work often negotiates the conversation between technology and the art world. Both are pretty sexist fields. How do you deal with the microaggressions in both spaces? Do you consider art a translation for your rage? AW: I definitely use art as an attempt to translate those conflicts, because art is seductive in the way it offers to meet our emotions and vulnerabilities. So much of the work I do is a response to being invisible but struggling to maintain evidence of presence. With AI, there’s this conundrum of it being a promise to optimize your life and make it easier with smartphones, but the downside is we’re always chained to our emails.  Addie Wagenknecht, self portrait - social graph, 2017. Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York. Photo by John Berens. |
AS: Your works translate this anxiety — not of technology but of the context that it’s often used for. I want to know more about how you conceptualize beauty and bodies, especially since our ideas of what a human can keep changing because of technology. What’s the relationship between beauty and fear to you? AW: The relationship of beauty and terror is such a duality. It’s very much about the “othering” of bodies in art and society and how it relates directly to consumption — be it within entertainment, military technology, or a domestic space. We’re given this narrative that men in positions of authority are there to protect and serve us but they mostly fail, and there is no neutral ground, not even in cyberspace. When we exist online, this starts to translate to who carries and sells our data and who is watching. Simone Browne talks about how blackness has been at the center of surveillance technologies and practices dating back to the slave trade in [her 2015 book] Dark Matters: “Could there be some potential in going about unknown or unremarkable, and perhaps unbothered, where CCTV, cameraenabled devices, facial recognition, and other computer vision technologies are in use?" So often being a woman or “other” — cis, queer or trans, bi, a person of color — is simply about having the right to be visible, having a right to exist in a space. The implications of that visibility mean always knowing the context: where your body is, how it is presented, and who is looking at it and who is following you, wanted and unwanted. There is a balance of visibility and fear. How do we translate this into something beautiful or translate it to something at all? Maybe this is where the art comes in. Sometimes the most successful way to translate an experience isn’t to yell or shout or scream into their gilded towers but to translate it into something so beautiful that they have to look at every day.  Addie Wagenknecht, self portrait - snow on cedar (winter), 2017. Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York. Photo by John Berens |
AS: You didn’t start off as an “artist”; you went to school for computer science and interactive telecommunication. When did you make the change — or rather, open up your practice in tech to do the stuff that you do now? AW: I’ve always struggled with the notion of what being an artist even means. It was only in the last year that I feel like I could call myself an artist because I never thought it was a viable career. As a kid, I remember seeing the Guerrilla Girls in the early ’90s. I was like, What’s going on? There’s this group of women who are anonymous and have a place of powerful engagement within the discussion of the art world! I remember thinking, This isn't something that I can get into, because when 90 percent of the art world is guys and 2 percent are women, what are my chances, specifically? The odds will always be stacked against us, so who wants to be part of that? Once I did accept my path anyway, it became, Why did I get here, and not all these other people? Impostor syndrome got to me. A few weeks ago, the Whitney had an exhibition up about feminists, and I walked in and there were the same Guerrilla Girl posters I had printed out and put in my bedroom as a teen. It was discouraging to see how little has changed since those were made 25 years ago. And it is frustrating now to be part of the system and having to identify as part of that system. Being uncomfortable with it but also depending on it is such a weird place to be in. AS: I deeply relate. I feel the same way about writing. We have to engage with other people in these systems to survive. We still need to figure out better ways of changing what final editorial control means, who has it, how we can engage with it when we’re creating work, and what it does to our work at the end of the day.  Addie Wagenknecht, self portrait - when everything was beautiful (spring), 2017. Courtesy bitforms gallery, New York. Photo by John Berens |
AW: Now I have been making a body of work, and everyone wants to see video documentation of it, when the whole point of the body of work is about not being a performance. Not being a being on display. And yet everyone I showed it to was like, “Where’s the video? I want to see you nude, on the canvas.” There’s this experience of always knowing your body is entertainment to other people. That’s part of why I wanted to make this exhibition. The #MeToo movement was just getting started, and there was a lot of pressure to out our experiences of sexual abuse, but my abuse isn’t available for clickbait. Part of this exhibition is to respond to women being used for men’s advancement, and it’s also about being physically absent. AS: You have your work and the Deep Lab community you put together of women in surveillance, technology, and art, and yet you still get impostor syndrome. What do you think would need to happen to you to feel like an artist? What would feel like enough? AW: I do think about it all the time. I think nothing would be enough? I think a lot to things I’ve done, like Deep Lab, is to make sure there’s something for the next generation, to be a manifestation of something they can identify with. Deep Lab is a collective of research on gender, security, art, and technology, and it started because I saw a void of women in opsec [operations security] and surveillance culture. I wanted to create a trajectory for women in that space who were already doing interesting and amazing things but elevate that work in a way that we couldn’t do separately. So we thought about problems that were unique to us and tried to bring that into discussion in the larger community. There’s a lot of overlapping interests, like projects on domestic violence and helping LGBTQ communities in the Middle East be safe — they all tie into a larger thing in the end. Violence can happen in a million different ways. And if you are awake and alive, you are constantly absorbing everything around you. So much of my work is a response and rejection of the things I witness and experience. I want to encapsulate it in a way that I think is easier for people to understand and redeem. Arabelle Sicardi is a queer beauty writer interested in the intersection between beauty and power. They’ve written for Teen Vogue, Allure, Elle, i-D, Shondaland, Hazlitt, and more. You can find them on Twitter and see their other work here. | | | | | | | | |
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