This week we took a look at the work of Tannaz Farsi and read a conversation between Suzi Gablik and Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett. I felt like both shared a focus on stripping multicultural art of its specific cultural meaning, and therefor able to make it meaningful to all audiences. Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett talks about how the backlash from the art establishment in response to the 1992 Whitney Biennial was to establish a kind of meritocracy that would do the same type of sidelining that institutional racism, sexism, homophobia and western bias had done for years. This conversation is especially relevant to the work of Tannaz Farsi. She is Persian, and I believe still has family living in Iran. As a woman from a predominantly Muslim area, now living in America, she has about every disadvantage to breaking out into the established art world as possible. I feel that her success is not the result of tokenism, as Hilton Kramer would maybe suggest, but instead because of the philosophy she and Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett share that all experiences are relevant to art and that there is some kind of meaning that we can all glean from these experiences.

Barbara Kirshenblat-Gimblett states that she is not particularly interested in the art world being able to absorb some works of "arts of living". I feel that Farsi often takes these "arts of living", such as the swing set in her back yard, or the sealed letters, and wants to translate them into the world of art. Farsi's intelligence and intent is obvious when she speaks about her work, but her craftsmanship and symbolism are obvious at first glance. I think her work agrees with Kirshenblat-Gimblett's idea that all work is in some way political. I think that it does not have to be overtly so, like Farsi's piece with the rotating mirrors, but there is a certain way in which societies (here, both American and Muslim) determine the role of women and our image of ourselves, and while the audience is not intended to be solely women, perhaps that influence is evident in that piece.

Personally, I was a little intimidated by Tannaz's work and ideas. I find myself relating more to Kirshenblat-Gimblett's idea of living arts. I know from personal experience that I sometimes have trouble making art for months on end. In that time, I still need to exercise my creative muscle, and will often do so by cooking elaborately, gardening, knitting or other crafts. Sometimes I want to make with out the pressure to create. That type of work is nice,  it comes without the ego of fine art. You can make dinner or a pair of mittens and share them with someone else and it improves both the maker and the receiver (even when one and the same) without the weight of meaning. That is one problem I have had with Suzi Gablik throughout the readings- as an artist, I simply am not strong enough to bear the burden of sharing Meaning with the world at large all the time. And I feel incapable of finding the type of meaning in my own work that Tannaz makes hers with. Sometimes I just want to make my immediate world a little bit better.

**** I chose to post a couple images by Banksy. I think he is a good example of how sometime a small joke can be really meaningful depending on how it affects your space, how operating outside of a gallery is like giving a gift to people and how the political will always show up sooner or later.