artist woman
November 11, 2002 01:03 PM

Someone asked me. What are you? Are you only a woman.

He meant. You're a feminist, so you're a woman first. But what else are you?

And I said. I think I'm a feminist before I'm a woman. How is that? I am first someone who can choose what to be, and then the things I choose. I said.

I think I'm an artist before I am a feminist.

Which is odd. I mean. Sometimes I barely even practice my art. Sometimes I wonder that I even call myself an artist. But it ultimately isn't even a choice.

I found the Frida movie so heartbreakingly beautiful. It's a movie that doesn't get tied up in its own emotional content. At least, the aspects of the movie which are "chick flick" (unique and timeless love, sick and dying woman, bleh bleh bleh) were flipped, made to service what felt like the real story - the visual.

In short, Julie Taymor knows what movies can do. How to give things structure with sound and image, how to tell a story without telling solely a history or a plot.

It becomes a story about art rather than a story about a woman artist. I think Kahlo would approve; she too is more artist woman than woman artist.

And something about the art and structure of this movie just kept making me weep.