OF#33 – Magic Moments, Community, and Mystical Marble
Is 157 the best way to capture the moments in a year? What ever happened to our sense of community? And what does the epitome of skill in marble sculpting look like?
Hi there, I’m Thomas Najar. Welcome to issue 33 of Open Frame.
Spring is here, and it really feels like it in Austin! Let’s dive in to the newsletter.
Moments from 2020
Gnarly Bay shared pieced together a short film to the sound of Tom Rosenthal’s song 157, a ten-minute song in which he counts to 157. It’s a beautiful montage of one family’s stolen moments that I found deeply touching.
Whither Community
Our society has been moving away from community for decades. The structures of society that fostered strong communal bonds have been replaced by an ethic of individualism that is atomizing and isolating. Anne Helen Petersen explores this dynamic and suggests we consider the commune as an alternative.
Communes were and are created as an antidote, or at very least an alternative, to capitalism. And the most anti-capitalistic thing about them is their clear-eyed commitment to community interdependence, which, as Jezer-Morton writes, “requires us to give up our stubborn belief in the myth that we have complete autonomy over how we spend our time.”
For most of us, that’s what’s keeping us from actual community. We recognize that systems of care and community are broken, and want to build them otherwise. We want dependability, we want intimacy, we want to spread burdens and celebrations across a wider swath of people. We want something else. But we have also been well-trained to resist inconvenience, even of the mildest sort: I want what I want, I want it this way, and at this cost, and I want it now.
She argues we’ve grown to believe that yielding to the demands of others is something we can live without. Rather than engaging in community, we can just do what we want to.
But it doesn’t work.
But the framework is so clearly failing us. Existences many of us understand as the height of privilege — to live absolutely alone, and thus have utter mastery over one’s choices, or to live just with a partner who does not significantly challenge those choices — have revealed themselves as vulnerabilities. We spend so much time wishing for dominion over our own spaces and lives and forget just how lonely it can be once we arrive there.
The truth is, we can’t have it all. We can’t have total control and actual security and care. Community does demand sacrifice in some form, but “sacrifice” does not have to be conceived, as it most often is, as negative; what might be lost in autonomy is gained in so many other forms.
As someone who has lived alone during the pandemic, this message of sacrificing autonomy for community really resonated with me.
Flowing Marble
Sculptors favor marble for its translucence and ability to portray delicate detail. Artists that wanted to showcase their skill would portray flowing garments. At the height of this trend is the portrayal of veils, and Giovanni Straza’s The Veiled Virgin is an exquisite example of this.
(via My Modern Met)
Animals Are Weird
The animal kingdom can be strange and fascinating, but I was not prepared for this.
That’s it for this week folks. Have a great week, stay safe, and remember to be awesome!
Thomas