July, in pieces
five of the things that got me thinking this month
What. A. Month.
From genuinely believing football was finally coming home and then realising, with crushing familiarity, it absolutely wasn’t…to navigating the longest heatwave I can remember, this month has already been a month of summers.
July’s been busier than usual both professionally and personally. The house renovation works have started in earnest (I’m living in perpetual dust), I’ve spent my weekends wandering around at least one exhibition, and I’ve read - my gosh, have I read this month.
So here we are, my July faves and for members, the golden nugget essays and podcasts that got me thinking.
Favourite exhibition
As you can probably tell from my recent posts, I've been to a few this month, but by far my favourite has to be the Tate's Frida: The Making of an Icon. Room by room you're met with her brush with surrealism (a categorisation she never accepted), her journey to accept her body after her accident, all the things that made her her until, right at the end, you're met with a room of fandom. A whole catalogue of things people have made commercialising her image.
I left the exhibition feeling a tad uneasy. I don’t know if it was the combination of the nude photographs Julien Levy took of her (which for some reason I found voyeuristic) or the entire room of paintings and notes explaining how Frida resisted Breton’s attempts to fold her into his band of surrealists. She was painting her own reality, not dreams and that “boxing in” of her talent, in my view, missed the point of her art completely. Or was it that finale? The commercialisation of her face with all the other things that went before it seemed to say to me that this exhibition was all about Frida, but not as she’d choose to be known.
It did, however, spark a bit of a rabbit hole I'm currently burrowing into, which will likely surface as a commonplace post (coming soon!).
Favourite essays
from Substack
Thee Book Club’s “You Don’t Know Yourself Until You’ve Met Yourself In a Book” is the perfect essay to read over your Sunday coffee. The author suggests that every bookshelf is, in some way, an autobiography. How we meet versions of ourselves in the characters we love and the ones we hate (perhaps especially those).
What I can't quite decide is which way round it goes. Did those characters show me things that were already in me, or did I take things from them and decide, over time, that they were mine?
The rest of this post is for members of the Studio where I share more essays, articles, lectures, podcast episodes that got me thinking this month
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Finally, one of you recently put me onto Paul Musso, PhD’s Substack and I. AM. OBSESSED.
