Grant Application

Kegels for Hegel

 

Describe your project as you really envision it to be instead of the way you have to present it for grant funding. (200 words)

Kegels for Hegel is an open collaboration of artists, academics and other creative, clever, disreputable types. The Kegels for Hegel founding foremuthas aren’t sure if we want to have children, but we are pretty sure we can’t afford them. After all, we went to college.

But… neoliberal capitalism be damned! We will make forms of connection that are family-like and corporeal — queer temporalities and queer kinship. We want to expand in space and time and be part of your bodies and the bodies of others.

We’re all inside of each other, because we have discussed things and read or seen each other’s work and have intellectual and intimate attachments. We make things with our friends, and that’s about as close to reproduction as it gets. We’re making things that will go inside of other people, and they, too, will be infected with some of the gooey, dynamic creative intimacy and collaboration and stimulation that cums with it.

Kegels for Hegel is somewhere between work and play, somewhere between participating in an academic panel and participating in an orgy.

Work/play with us.

 

A (250 word) description of your project

242 words.

Straddling philosophical smutcore and tongue in chic, Kegels for Hegel is a conceptual art project that makes queerly ambivalent songs, music videos, and art objects that both revere and mess with the intellectual production of philosophers. We are a “band” fronted by two academics. We perform songs that we write as a means to engage with the thinkers that have inspired our academic work.

Unlike our academic training, which consisted of specialized study over decades, Kegels for Hegel is based in the emancipatory potential of a lack of expertise. We make songs using simple computer programs, cellphone apps and loops of noise that we find or create.

We are interested in the “work” that an artwork performs: we take the language of academic discourse and make it speak in the dialect of music. As our artwork comes to werk, it engages the subversive possibilities of drag culture and performance spectacle.

The impregnating power of thought and theory is our sui generis. While our project is not pedagogical in a strict sense, it is a comment on the conditions of intellectual, and more so, institutionalized academic production. It is informed by our work teaching at universities and our interest in igniting dialogues about theory and power relations. In the Italian autonomist feminist Marxist tradition, we in-vaginate the politics of riproduzione. We transform reproduction from the birthing of children to social and political breeding of ideas in bastions of power such as the university.

 

Current and Future Production

For the album “Fucking with Philosophers,” we have released songs, videos and corollary projects. In this Pastelegram issue, we include X new songs and X new videos and X new projects. The Pastelegram issue assembles our team of collaborators and melds their projects — from poems to music videos to academic essays — into an online archive.

We plan for our “Fucking with Philosophers” album to include 16 love songs, with a music video for each song. But we don’t just fuck with philosophers! We have begun working on a second album, “The Conditions of Academic Production,” which will work/play with educational debt, adjunct labor and structural racism in the academy.

 

How does your project take an original and imaginative approach to content and form? Please be as specific as possible. (100 words)

81 words

Conceptually, Kegels for Hegel is based on a dialectic of sex: the back and forth transference of energy where participants can arouse excitement, spread seed, delight, form relationships and even create new beings, should they choose. In musical genres ranging from electro pop, chanson, corrido norteño and polka music, we pay homage to and poke fun at feminism, class politics, cultural theory, and colonialism. Whether dressed in BDSM, H&M, or high femme, we work both the brain and the pelvic floor.

 

What kind of impact—artistic, intellectual, communal, civic, social, etc.—do you hope your project will have? What strategies will you employ to achieve the desired impact? (100 words)

98 words

In a time of what has been described as enormous intellectual peril, Kegels for Hegel extols the sexiness of thought. Our project transmits essential principals of theories while questioning the way that certain worldviews are normalized, naturalized and unmarked while others are anthropologized, othered and questioned. With playfulness and humor, we mix up the lines of high theory and low culture; low theory and high culture. Our work is a raunchy affront to respectability politics. It is a means to take structures of power to task with critical thought, all set to a beat and in florescent colors.

 

How might your proposed project act as a catalyst for your artistic and professional growth? In what ways is it a pivotal moment in your practice? (100 words)

92 words

Thus far our project has been funded by us, academics indebted by their education, and through Kickstarter. It has also been made possible by the generosity of talented friends who have donated their time and energy to the project. In order for Kegels for Hegel to realize its potential, we need to finish the art objects, songs and videos for our first album, “Fucking with Philosophers” and create exhibitions with the material that we are producing. This requires more editing, musical and computer equipment as well as costumes, props and sculpture supplies. We also need an expanded online presence as well as more comprehensive documentation.

 

Biography (200 words)

48 words

         was born in San Antonio, Texas and was socialized to be a nice Christian girl. She didn’t become a disreputable Latina until feminism and anthropology corrupted her at the university. Dr.      now spreads the corruption in courses on Women and Gender Studies as well as Queer and Sexuality Studies as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the           and is working on her first book project, entitled,                                 at the          . Her academic research focuses upon sexual labor, migration, and the US/Mexico relationship.

          is trained as an art historian and an artist. She studied art practice at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and at California Institute of the Arts in California, both at the Masters of Fine Arts level. At those institutions she studied photography, sculpture and design, working with costume as well as plastics.      is currently the         Curatorial Fellow                                . She is also collaborating on several curatorial projects and finishing her PhD.        has published and taught on contemporary art and design in Latin America, Europe and the United States.

        and           founded Kegels for Hegel in 2011 when they were snowed into a rat-infested dirty hippie co-op in Rochester, New York. Their Kegel within was awakened as a conceptual art project when they realized that they should squeeze all of their interdisciplinary creativity together and synthesize with their super smart friends. Kegels for Hegel has been squirting sexed up social theory all over the faces of academics, artists, and fanboys and grrrls and non-gender conforming people as they have migrated between Berlin, Mexico City, Austin, San Diego and Houston.

 

Provide a short history of your work together as a collaborative team. (200 words)

197 words

We began composing lyrics for ambivalent love songs to philosophers under the name Kegels for Hegel in 2010. This was the start of the album “Fucking with Philosophers,” which we will finish with support from the          . Soon after, we began using computer programs such as GarageBand to compose the music for the songs. Since then we have performed songs, made videos and merchandise, as well as authored texts. Thus far we have released three videos and four songs, performed internationally at art galleries, music festivals, and dance parties as well as presented our texts as readings in museums and as experimental art writings in art publications.

Because our life as academics facilitates many moves to different academic institutions around the world, the project functions as an open chain letter that allows us to work with colleagues near and far who have similarly complicated relationships with intellectual ontologies. Taking on an ethos of D.I.Together (instead of DIY), other intellectuals, be they academics or artists, contribute material and labor and the project has taken on the venues from classrooms to blogs.

 

Education

           holds a Doctorate and Master’s degrees in Socio-cultural Anthropology            and an undergraduate degree in Anthropology from the              .

       is finishing her PhD in                   Art                .        holds a Master’s in Art History from           and an MFA in Art Practice from California Institute of the Arts. Her undergraduate degree in Art History and Spanish Literature is from               , and she studied Art Practice at Universität der Künste in Berlin.

 

Selected Bibliography (200 words)

Experimental Art Writing and Publications

Kegels for Hegel, Pastelegram, invited guest artists, Fall 2015 issue, "Sexing up Social Theory."

Kegels for Hegel, La Misión (Berlin), The Brown Corner : “Notes on Aztlán,” ‘zine 3, print and online late March 2015, (link)

Kegels for Hegel. Bi-annual online magazine, The Destroyer, curated by Andy Campbell, “Landscape/ Body” issue 4, online January 2015, (link).

San Diego Reader, “Kegels for Hegel,” print and online (link)

 

Public Presentations or Publications of work (exhibitions, festivals, books, journals, etc.) (300 words)

Exhibitions and Performances

+ PASTELEGRAM AT VORTEX

+ AUSTIN HEMI INSTITUTE (Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Austin November 2015)

Dykon Fagatron Queer Dance Party at Crocker Bar, Houston, TX February 28, 2015.

“Aztlán (Love Song to HB2281)” at Video Snack, curated by Lauren Francescone and Zeynab Izadyar, 56 Bogart Studios in Brooklyn August 25, 2013, (link)

“Bitácoras de un equívoco” (Logbook of An Error) at Estación Cero, Pueblo Nuevo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Curated by Julio Garcia Murillo and Eloisa Ojeda. August 24, 2013.(link)

“La Envaginación del conocimiento: Un manifesto” (The Envagination of Knowledge: A Manifesto) at Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños in Oaxaca, Mexico during the “Conferencia de prensa: Bitácoras de un equívoco.” August 21, 2013. Documentation available at: (YouTube)

“Performative Incorporations: Extravaganza de films, telepatía, y poesía (infrarrealista)” at SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico. Organized by Mariana Botey, Amy Sara Carroll, and Ricardo Dominguez. July 17, 2013.

“Fucking with Philosophers: A Performance with Jello Brains and Male go-go Dancers” at University Art Gallery, University of California San Diego. Part of the exhibition “We'd love your company: A project with Ethan Breckenridge.” Curated by Michelle Y. Hyun. April 19, 2013.

 

Online Exhibition of Videos

“Aztlan (Love Song to Gloria Anzáldua)”, “Thing (Love Song to Karl Marx and Friends),” “Bite Me (Love Song to Friedrich Nietzsche),” “I Wanna Fight You to the Death (Love Song to GWF Hegel)”

 

Awards and Honors 200 words

75 words

Work reviewed at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico during the “Revision de Portofolios” Sessions.

Accepted at SOMA Summer School, Mexico City, Mexico with full scholarship for one member of Kegels for Hegel (declined due to insufficent funds).

Accepted at Vienna Sommerschule (declined due to insufficent funds).

Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU, “Encuentro 2013” in Mexico City (event cancelled) and “Encuentro 2014” in Montreal (unable to attend due to funding).