Although I didn’t get the page up quite as quickly as I’d planned, I have now configured and added Madam Spatchcock’s Beauty Blog.
This work-in-progress photo essay will explore identity in the age of COVID-19, through the lens of Madam Spatchcock, newly reincarnated for the 21st Century, as a beauty blogger.
Our presence in the world — by necessity — is becoming largely a digital one. Although this was increasingly becoming the case prior to the current pandemic, it is now nearly ubiquitous, affecting even those of us who previously retained a largely analog presence in our daily lives. Rather than in-person meetings, we are having Zoom calls and conferences. Classes are being held online, rather than in classrooms. Face-to-face meetings are rare, and even then, our physical bodies are often separated by masks, gloves, and goggles.
This project aims to look at beauty and fashion, as they relate to the zeitgeist of disease and death. Much like Madam Spatchcock’s original incarnation as the Steampunk Rag-and-Bone purveyor, this project centers around art, fashion, and subculture as harbingers and portraits of the current cultural moment, as reflected both unconsciously and in a more conscious, overt manner.
As with the Plague Doctor essay, I plan to share the evolution of this project. It may, at some point, take on a more finished form — but the beauty of blogging is that I can share my own experience as a new blogger and an artist working in an entirely new way.
As I wait for the arrival of filming backdrops, a webcam (for conferencing) and a number of other things I never imagined I would care to own, I’m reminded of a moment that seems almost like yesterday. My mother (who was ahead of her time) gifted me with my first computer, which was a Commodore Amiga. I was a 20-something undergraduate, majoring in art, with very little idea what I might want to do eventually. I remember telling her that I didn’t need a computer, and that I never wanted to own one. I preferred bound books, hand-painted art, and typewriters. Nonetheless, I made use of the Amiga for word-processing my English literature essays. I still have faded copies of those papers, printed on my daisy-wheel printer, with my professor’s treasured commentary written on them.
English literature would eventually become a second major for me, alongside psychology, when I eventually returned to school to finish the undergraduate studies that were started and stopped several times during the 1990s. I never finished the undergraduate major in art, largely because San Francisco State University, where I was studying, had begun to cap the number of undergrad units one could accrue without graduating. I eventually settled on psychology and English literature as my majors, and temporarily let fall to the background my other loves of art and human sexuality studies ( though I would resume studying art many years later as a post-bac and then a dual MFA/MA student at San Francisco Art Institute.) I may yet pursue graduate level studies in human sexuality, though that remains one of several possibilities for future educational endeavors.
As the future becomes more and more one of digital interface with others, and my Amiga is only one of a list of now-obsolete computers I have owned over the years, I still take solace in my bound books. To this day, I have the copies of my James Joyce books, and my Yeats and Eliot readers complete with the handwritten notes I kept in the margins while taking those undergrad literature classes so long ago. They are even more precious to me now than they were at the time. There are some things that digital technology cannot replicate, and the classroom experiences I had in a day when my professor lectured from his hand-written notes are very high on that list.
Spatchcocking the Future 