METHODOLOGIES
25 SEPTEMBER - 26 SEPTEMBER 2021
REFLECTIVE NOTES:
PART 1- Orientation- Critiquing the Critique w/ Jean Marie Casbarian
PART 2- Session 10- Research Studio for the Artist, A Workshop w/ Abbey Odunlami
PART 3- Session 10- Autoethnography, Personal & Political In Research Context, A Workshop w/ Elena Marchevska
The cumulative or overall effects of my digesting the required TT ORIENTATION Critiquing the Critique, and SESSION 10: METHODOLOGIES readings (videos and texts) and in-session discussions and exercises, especially viewing The Room of Silence, which I did first, and Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts, Holman Jones’ Creative Selves, Creative Cultures, Critical Auto-ethnography Performance and Pedagogy, and Baldwin’s Creative Process, I am for the first time in my life, feeling able to begin to articulate the beginnings of what I now might call my auto-ethnography.
An impulse to undertake this is has been vaguely floating in my mind over the past few years. What I am thinking about as a kind of self-redefinition or expanded self-understanding could potentially be summed up in a word that has been bobbing in and out of my thoughts during the past few months, which is liminality. I am thinking about how liminal pertains to my ethnic heritage.
Note: On the Fitzpatrick Scale* my skin tone is between a Type III, Medium White to Olive and a Type IV, Olive Moderate Brown. I think it's curious how there is no simply "olive" option. ??? LOL. Also reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Luschan%27s_c…
And its historical antecedent: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropometry
Seriously though, this maybe the most baffling simultaneously inspiring and curious history of chart making/data compiling I have run across in this new-to-me-this-year (2021) body of (personal/studio vs. teaching/academic) research. I intend to delve more deeply into it, both in my studio and here.
Side note: I had a similar self re-defining or self-clarifying experience immediately after giving birth to my daughter a few decades ago. Only then it was with my feminist self. That is the last time I was so immersed in such a personal and simultaneously academic self-re-definition. It changed my orientation not only to myself, but also how I live and perceive life, the world, history, etc. And maybe this self-expansion will not be as dramatic, but it might be.
A factor during these recent few years…something influencing or instigating some of this, is my learning about my scientific DNA composition…during early 2018. I grew up thinking of myself as predominantly Italian America, with some Greek (via my Italian immigrant maternal grandfather, who was named Domenico Filia…(through an uncle we learned that that Domenico had some Greek ancestry, which matches the Greek origins of his last name), and some Eastern European ancestry…that via one of my paternal great-grandmother Angeline Toman's immigration documents reveal along with stories about her that my grandmother told.
Also influencing this is the recent release of my writer brother Russell Shorto’s book, Smalltime, which is to a great extent about our paternal grandfather, and about his parents’ immigration to the US. Joe Heim of the Washington Post, Outlook, Review stated in his Feb. 12, 2021 column “… Shorto’s story is not just about his family. It’s also a social history of a place and time — industrial Pennsylvania from the early 20th century on — as it is being shaped by an influx of immigrants who are resented for their arrival, forced into the worst jobs and homes, and struggling to survive outside of an official America that makes their path harder at every opportunity.”
And, as mentioned in my reading log on The Room of Silence, hearing from others throughout my life how I appear “exotic” plus countless other similarly perplexing if not alienating comments (ex. Because of some of my physical features, to some I appear “blended”, and many have ask me if I am “mixed”, or “both”, or what ethnicity I am…then they proceed to guess.)
These kinds of life experiences, along with my 23&me DNA test results, which scientifically confirm that I do not qualify as what our still Euro-centric (or Anglo-centric) world considers white. As I have never been treated as fully white, I have never felt fully white. Nor I am considered by those with brown or black skin, who consider themselves “people of color” to be a “person of color.” My skin color is not “portrait pink” (paint color name), nor is it brown or black. It is sallow-y or olive-y… a typically Mediterranean skin color. Partly as a result of that, I have never self-described as a person of color either.
The DNA testing I mentioned indicates that scientifically, my composition is:
78.6% Southern European (= 60.7% Italian + 14.2% Greek & Balkan
+ 3.7% Broadly Southern European)
8.2% Eastern European
0.2% Ashkenazi Jewish
0.1% Broadly European
AND
12.5% Western Asian/North African (= 3.9% Iranian Caucasian and Mesopotamian + 2.9% Cypriot + 3.4% Broadly Northwest Asian)
0.6% North African
0.4% Coptic Egyptian
1.3% Broadly Western Asian & North African
0.1% Trace Ancestry (Senegambian & Guinean)
0.3% Unassigned
While my ethnic and cultural upbringing…this part of my self-identity, is majority Italian American, (very little cultural deference was paid to my Eastern European immigrant great-grandmother's ethnicity or heritage), and much of this matches my DNA test results, yet there was/is a surprise-to-me scientific data showing 12.5% of my DNA is Western Asian/North African. This revelation is another contributing factor in my shifting, expanding self-awareness.
Though my Sicilian and Eastern European immigrant great-grandparents and my Italian immigrant grandfather were, I do not feel nor do I claim to be, an ethnic outlier. I may consider this new found state of “liminality”, not a marginalization, but a lever into an ethnically neutral zone. As an artist and as a human being, I regard most states of neutrality an advantage… so I am thinking that this is either neutralizing or potentially advantageous.
When I feel myself as neutral or liminal, as an in-between "ethnic" person, it allows me to also consider the possibility of myself as a gender-liminal person...as in my feminine/masculine energy balance is about 50-50. And while I do fully inhabit a cis female body, and gladly use she/her pronouns, on an energetic level, I am equally feminine/masculine. It allows me to exist in a gender- balanced or gender-neutral space. And I further consider myself in terms of my spirituality…as spirit, ruach (living breath). In this respect, are we not all identity-marker neutral? This is a kind of liminality too, right?
And while I have peripherally been thinking of some of these things, focusing on it, in the context of a sense of liminality, my in-between-ness, in my studio practice this coming semester or two, just in the course of reading these pieces, I consider focusing my painting on a kind of liminality, particularly in relationship to my ethnicity...and that within my larger proposed color project.
For providing the insight and inspiration through all of the very engaging, intellectually and emotionally stimulating material, I thank all of the TT faculty. I am grateful for how generous you all are.
*The Fitzpatrick Scale (also Fitzpatrick skin typing test; or Fitzpatrick phototyping scale) is a numerical classification schema for human skin color. It was developed in 1975 by American dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick as a way to estimate the response of different types of skin to ultraviolet (UV) light. It was initially developed on the basis of skin color to measure the correct dose of UVA for PUVA therapy, and when the initial testing based only on hair and eye colour resulted in too high UVA doses for some, it was altered to be based on the patient's reports of how their skin responds to the sun; it was also extended to a wider range of skin types. The Fitzpatrick scale remains a recognized tool for dermatological research into human skin pigmentation.
The following list shows the six categories of the Fitzpatrick scale in relation to the 36 categories of the older von Luschan scale (in parenthesis):
Type I (scores 0–6) always burns, never tans (palest; freckles)
Type II (scores 7–13) usually burns, tans minimally (light colored but darker than fair)
Type III (scores 14–20) sometimes mild burn, tans uniformly (golden honey or olive)
Type IV (scores 21–27) burns minimally, always tans well (moderate brown)
Type V (scores 28–34) very rarely burns, tans very easily (dark brown)
Type VI (scores 35–36) never burns (deeply pigmented dark brown to darkest brown)
*en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale
*www.arpansa.gov.au/sites/default/files/…
Following a "Listen/Hear/Interview" writing exercise, I received this email from a fellow PhD candidate who had interviewed me during class.
Dear Gina,
Thank you for your generosity and open sharing. This is my gift to you on listening and hearing.
It was wonderful to notice that so many of your auditory memories relate to important men in your life, and how you have created space for music all around you. The tenderness of your father, and how your descriptions of his sounds opened other sensory memories of his smell. And of how he filled the house with music, an act which has continued with the men you have chosen to spend your life with. There is a beauty in seeing that continuation, and your joy in that.
It was an interesting shift with the talk about dreams, as the sounds became more wild and less welcoming with the sound of a rabid wolf, yet there is still something so lovely about the poetry of, "you're a healthy piece of fiction". I think of the holistic effect of stories, and the protection we can carve out for ourselves with our personal stories.
Thank you for sharing these insights.
In gratitude and solidarity,
E
In another of the in-class discussions and exercises, we received prompts and wrote. My response to one of the prompts:
All of A Piece
Though introvert-me is comfortable with and even enjoys aspects of the pandemic induced home-confinement, and meditator-me is grateful for time and space to sit in a “neutral” zone...to be with things like my primal fear... at the same time claustrophobe-me struggles with an on-going sense of anxiety over the loss of freedom to move about the world, which apparently I had taken for granted.
And since I desire to regain that sense of freedom, I am perplexed by the 30+ percent of the US population resisting any version of a CoVid vaccination. I try to comprehend what they are “thinking” or what they are reacting to, or against…? I also struggle with not judging that choice, because when I do think of it, I find myself judging it an unwise and selfish one.
Another bit of pandemic collateral damage was a move out of my creative community, which for years prior to CoVid, I had enjoyed with about 80 other New York City artists at Midtown Manhattan’s Elizabeth Foundation studios. At this moment, it occurs to me that this may have been one of the main catalysts for writing my Transart application/project earlier this year. That I was accepted and am becoming part of a fabulous new group of creatives, is surely the great big silver lining in that particular cloud.
Speaking of clouds, since my early childhood I have been learning about and anticipating that we were all going to be more responsible stewards of our earth and its resources...develop and use solar, wind and other viable, sustainable power sources. It mystifies me that most of the world, US included, is still not taking aggressive action to stop our deadly overuse of fossil fuels, on-going cultivation and over-consumption of live-stock, and other crisis producing practices.
Gina
