… in Stanford linguistics — the announcement:

The Department of Linguistics is pleased to announce a dissertation oral presentation on 6/12/24:

Indexing Respectability by Zion Mengesha

Committee: Penny Eckert (co-chair), Rob Podesva (co-chair), Jonathan Rosa, John Rickford, Paula Moya (university chair)

Abstract:

African American women were historically excluded from ideas about who “counts” as a speaker of AAE, and their speech behavior was oversimplified as white accommodating. Furthermore, early literature on language and gender tended to focus on the speech of white women, rendering African American women nearly invisible. My dissertation seeks to redress these epistemic injustices. I examine the linguistic expression of respectability and respectability politics among African American women in Sacramento, CA. Using speakers’ narratives, I uncover three logics women use to orient to the respectability regime, which I call Traditionalist, Radicalist, and Black Bourgeoisie.

In the first paper, I show how Traditionalist women use features of the California Vowel Shift (CVS) to meet the expectation that Black women should adhere to dominant white standards of language. In the second paper, I show that Radicalists refuse participation in CVS – actively rejecting the white gaze – and show how one Radicalist, who aligns her speech with the African American Vowel System (AAVS), re-appraises the value of AAE in the linguistic economy. In the third paper, I show how Bougie Black Women draw on established meanings of CVS and AAVS to generate new indexical meanings. I then show how one Bougie speaker produces a wide range for [the DRESS vowel] encompassing both CVS and AAVS and [the TRAP vowel] in line with CVS to challenge the limits of the meanings of Black upper-class through bricolage. Across all three papers, I discuss the semiotic resources African American women use to perform these modes of respectability, including hairstyles, ways of dressing, tastes, religion, and education. I conclude with a discussion of how African American women work within models of personhood and beyond them to imagine new possibilities for Black female personhood.

I’m pleased to report that ZM defended her dissertation successfully. I spent the afternoon in medical appointments, so I’ll have to defer my comments on the substance of the dissertation. But hang on.

It appeared on Pinterest this morning, with no information beyond the artist’s name, Anthony Cudahy: a dreamlike sexual encounter like this one:

(#1) Like this one, but with a significant dream penis and testicle, which hog our attention; eventually, I’ll show you Full Frontal Man, but here, we’re drawn to the relationship between the somewhat anxious yellow-hued guy and the purple guy looming over him — note the subtle hand on yellow guys’s head, and then the head of another purple figure behind him, a remembered character, no doubt from another artwork, Cudahy’s or someone else’s

(I’d tell you more about this painting, but this is all I’ve got. So far the only copy of the image on the net seems to be this one on Pinterest.)

My first experience of Cudahy’s world. A quick intro from Wikipedia:

Anthony Cudahy (born [in] Florida, 1989) is an American painter. Cudahy’s approach is both figurative and abstract and takes inspiration from a breadth of source material ranging from personal photographs, movie stills, queer archival images and ephemera, and art history. Cudahy lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

… Cudahy’s paintings are often a hybrid of visual histories blending various figures from art history and queer photography into contemporary scenes such as portraiture, domestic spaces, or social sites.

Now for more detail.

Two examples. First, about the Hyperallergic site:

Sensitive to Art and Its Discontents: Hyperallergic [based in Brooklyn] is a leading voice in contemporary perspectives on art, culture, and more. The online publication was founded by the husband-and-husband team, Veken Gueyikian and Hrag Vartanian, in 2009 as a forum for playful, serious, and radical perspectives on art in society.

Them from it, a piece about an exhibition at the Semiose Gallery in Paris: “The Ethereal Everyday of Anthony Cudahy: Bathed in unnatural colors, Cudahy’s portraits carry an oneiric atmosphere” (by Sebastian Zinn on 6/29/21), with examples, among them:

(#2) Self-portrait after Hockney ’83 (2021) (photo by A. Mole), with one of Cudahy’s Conversation paintings in the background

(#3) Twinned (2021), both bright and indistinct (photo by A. Mole)

Now, I’m sure I’ve never spoken the word oneiric — /onájrɪk/ — and pretty sure I’ve never written it, but it’s a fancy, trisyllabic, technical term for an important notion that has everyday, shorter alternatives. From NOAD:

adj. oneiric: formal relating to dreams or dreaming.

That is, dreamlike, as in my first sentence above. Or conveyed by the modifying noun dream, as in dream penis (also above). But don’t blame AC for the piss-elegant oneiric, blame Sebastian Zinn.

In any case, there’s the dream connection. On to:

The blending of paintings, in a kind of conversation between them. First, about BOMB magazine, from Wikipedia:

Bomb (stylized in all caps as BOMB) is an American arts magazine edited by artists and writers, published quarterly in print and daily online. It is composed primarily of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplines — visual art, literature, film, music, theater, architecture, and dance. In addition to interviews, Bomb publishes reviews of literature, film, and music, as well as new poetry and fiction.

… Bomb was launched in 1981 by a group of New York City-based artists, including Betsy Sussler, Sarah Charlesworth, Glenn O’Brien, Michael McClard, and Liza Béar, who sought to record and promote public conversations between artists without mediation by critics or journalists

The name Bomb is a reference to both Wyndham Lewis’ Blast and the fact that the magazine’s original editors expected the publication to “bomb” after one or two issues.

Then, from BOMB, “Interview: Anthony Cudahy by Sarah Moroz: Painting that thinks through other images” on 8/30/23, SM’s intro:

The New York City–based artist Anthony Cudahy is currently unfurling an exchange between his own paintings and those of a small French museum’s collections in Conversation at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole in eastern France. Creating an homage to European painting and decorative-art pieces, Cudahy’s fragile bodies and multiple planes echo carefully selected works from the past. Given his desire to lend greater visibility to neglected histories, his interest in the archives plays out harmoniously in this cadre as he champions small, delicate, and often unattributed French artists from centuries ago alongside his own vibrant canvases.

From the interview, on the conversation between images and on seeing the world through a queer lens, within a queer body:

SM:For the Conversation exhibition in France, how is the selected work dialoguing with your own?

AC: The museum invited me with the idea that I would respond to pieces in their collection. That was ideal for me because painting allows you to be influenced by past work, and then you change past works by context. It’s this very flexible, moving thing; and I love how self-referential painting is to other painting. It feels as if the way painters think is through other images.

We went to visit the museum a year ago and got the chance to go through all their storage units and look at the work that was hanging up in the permanent collection at that time. I went through thousands of images and whittled it down to a manageable amount. I then really quickly realized that almost all the images I picked were unattributed. I was just drawn to a lot of these strange allegorical paintings, a lot of landscape painting.

… SM: With this pairing exercise in Conversation, is a queer lens inextricable from putting these works together?

AC: I think inextricable is a good word for it because it’s not necessarily that I’m illustrating queerness or actively trying to flip things onto a queer lens. But I also feel like it’s so intrinsic that it doesn’t have to be explicitly about it to be inflected by it; it inflects everything, even if you’re not necessarily directly talking about it because a lot of the things I’m talking about are human fears and experiences. I mean, I have my positionality. But when I get to a shorthand of imagery, such as a lot of those genre paintings of the hunt and stuff, I feel like they have to do with the sort of violence that’s simmering, and then the figures are usually in a precarious position within that. Sometimes I’m talking about that within a queer body in society. I want the work to be open in that way.

Case history 1. AC’s doggedly pursues images to blend with his own visual imagination. I offer two case histories, the first treated at some length in a New York Art Tours piece, “Anthony Cudahy at Hales Gallery” by Merrily Kerrin on 10/11/21:

Medicinal or deadly depending on its use, Antiaris toxicaria (aka the Anti-bausor tree) is the missing presence in this painting by Brooklyn-based painter Anthony Cudahy at Hales Gallery. Partly inspired by an antique woodcut featuring two men lying on the ground under the fruit-bearing tree, here it’s the artist and his husband who lie prone. But while it’s uncertain if the characters in the original woodcut are alive, Cudahy and partner appear to enjoy a peaceful sleep, occupying a subconscious realm complicated by the spider and webs in the upper register. Alluding to Kate Bush’s ‘Coral Room,’ a song featuring a web-spinning ‘spider of time,’ the references place the couple in a poetic realm of dreams and memory.  (On view through Oct 30th in Chelsea)

The woodcut:

(#4) Bohan Upas, the tree of poisons

And AC’s painting:

(#5) Anti-bausor tree (protected sleepers, wolf’s-bane and spider around) (2021)

Background for #4 (and #5); AC isn’t just making this stuff up. First, on the actual tree, from Wikipedia:

Antiaris toxicaria is a tree in the mulberry and fig family, Moraceae. It is the only species currently recognized in the genus Antiaris. … Antiaris has a remarkably wide distribution in tropical regions, occurring in Australia, tropical Asia, tropical Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Tonga, and various other tropical islands [AZ: and therefore has many, many common names]. Its seeds are spread by various birds and bats, and it is not clear how many of the populations are essentially invasive. The species is of interest as a source of wood, bark cloth, and pharmacological or toxic substances.

… The latex of Antiaris toxicaria contains intensely toxic cardenolides, in particular a cardiac glycoside named antiarin. It is used as a toxin for arrows, darts, and blowdarts in Island Southeast Asian cultures.

Then, on the fabled tree that’s the model for AC’s painting, from the Gode Cookery site, “Mythical Plants of the Middle Ages”, about Bohan Upas and the Bausor Tree:

Antiaris toxicaria, the fabled Bausor Tree of narcotic fumes: The first voyagers to Malay returned with grisly tales of a poisonous tree growing on the islands near Cathay, which was called the Bohun Upas — the tree of poisons. To the medieval traveler this tree was to be shunned, as it produced narcotic and toxic fumes which killed plants and animals for miles around. If one were to fall asleep in the shade of this tree, he would never awaken. Malaysians supposedly executed prisoners by tying them to the trunk of this great tree. By the 15th c. the tales of this tree had grown fantastic, and highly stylized drawings of the Bohun Upas were in some of the first printed books. The legend itself was probably based on the Bausor Tree (Antiaris toxicaria), which produces a poisonous latex used by natives on arrow tips.

Case history 2. The second comes up in the BOMB interview of Cudahy:

SM Is there a new piece of yours that feels especially significant?

AC There’s this one that I made that’s called The Only Tune (2023). Do you know the composer Nico Muhly? I’ve always loved that early album from him, Mothertongue; and there’s a song suite at the end called “The Only Tune” taken from this really intense, morbid folk song. Muhly talked a lot about it being this musical necromancy.

So much of the work in the show is about these layers with work building on past work and painting being this kind of cannibalistic medium where it’s constantly using itself as material to make another thing. And so I made this painting referencing Caravaggio musicians where it’s these two figures and sheet music on a table, and I was desperate to actually make the sheet music from that Muhly song.

You can buy his music online, but I couldn’t find it for this. As a last-ditch effort, I asked on my private Instagram stories: “Does anyone know Nico Muhly or someone who does?” I found someone who knows him, and he got to Nico, and the reason there was no sheet music was because it was a studio album. Generously, he said: “I could probably fake it.” And he did, and I got to paint into the work a really detailed musical score to that song.

AC’s painting, seen here in the only photo I could find, from the actual exhibition, so the painting appears on a slant:

(#6) The Only Tune (2023)

Background on Nico Muhly, in my 7/3/14 posting “Music and words”, about Jeremy Denk and Nico Muhly — in which it becomes clear that Nico knows everybody, including me.

Return to genitalia. As a final flourish, AC’s #1 as it actually appeared in Pinterest:

(#7) This version is more carnally focused, with the yellow guy’s dick and ball thrust into the center of the composition

The two versions are not to be ranked against one another; they’re simply different paintings, doing different things.

The two verions

xx