I often find if something genuinely moves me, or is very important to me, that these are the things that are hardest to express. Even as I want to indicate my great pleasure, or the intellectual challenge that something has given to me, I often prefer to keep that private. There is a level of “caringness” that is easy to express. Obviously, I am always trying to express “things”. But somewhere between “changing my life” and “making me cry”, however, is harder for me.
This project by Casey Jenkins moves me.
It is not alone or unique in its style of performance art or on the feminist commentary that it poses, as this Gawker article notes, but I am already aware from a brief Google about that there are a number of shocked and frankly anti-woman sentiments that this work is generating. It is a depressing testament to the work’s ultimate value.
I don’t particularly want to give them any more air time, even as a systematic critique is probably in order, for someone at least.
Instead, I will simply let you know that as a person who has a vagina, I found this to be a very gentle but moving work, contemplative and human, articulate and beautiful. I don’t think that my response need mandate yours, but perhaps you would consider your reaction from a real, or imagined, placed of empathy with Casting Off My Womb, and look for other interesting projects with Craft Cartel perhaps too.
eleanor j jackson 