Life was work and also a performance

I perform in art time and in real time, and you can't tell the difference — no one knows how to separate a real act from an art act in my work. 

— Tehching Hsieh

Memory Piece, by Lisa Ko, covers the past, present, and future, with each major section focusing on one of a trio of lifelong friends: respectively, Giselle, the performance artist; Jackie, the techy; and Ellen, the activist. They met as teenagers, bonded over a barbecue.

Giselle's life starts to come into focus for her when she hears about a performance piece that can only be Tehching Hsieh's Rope Piece (for which I will be forever grateful this book introduced me to).

She could not make her mother happy yet felt responsible for her mother's unhappiness. Her coping mechanism was to treat everything like it was a situation, but her performance self and real self had become indistinguishable. Work was a performance; life was work and also a performance. It wasn't that she needed to wait for the perfect idea or invent something new. Instead, she recognized how she could shape her life into the performance itself.

(Perhaps I should treat my life this way: perform as an employee, perform as a writer, perform as a doting daughter, etc. to the best of my ability. Fake it till I make it.)

This is the most interesting section of the book for me — its exploration of art, time, labour, intention, context, posterity.

After months of writing her memories, Giselle had begun to see everything she did as future memory. The mundane could be fabulous; everything became expansive. This made her more daring, because when you saw life through the lens of potential nostalgia, even difficult events could carry the smallest element of fondness for having survived them.

(I think we do this every time we snap a photo.)

In the spirit of archiving the everyday, Jackie pioneers some blog software, but grapples with data management and the battle between democratization and turning a profit. When the dot-com bubble bursts, some of her moral grappling is alleviated. 

But. The novel as a whole doesn't really work for me. It's giving writer workshop. A couple linguistic anachronisms jarred me out of the story (young women were not calling each other "dude" in the early 1990s; similarly "vibe" and "hook up"  appear with clear 2020s usages). It describes the old women of 2040 as if they were the old women of yesteryear. 

Most significantly, I don't understand how we get to that future from here. It's a housing crisis taken to the extreme, compounded by constant surveillance and border checks. Despite the known evils of gentrification, real-estate speculation, property-flipping and vacation rentals, construction industry and municipal corruption, and plain old greed, it doesn't feel right for Ellen's story as a squatter fighting eviction to end up as it does. (At some point I figured that Y2K had transpired as the apocalyptic event some feared it would be. Except even in the novel's reality we know it didn't.) And I'm a little disappointed that aspects of Ellen's alternative living — community building, recycling and waste management, dumpster diving, rooftop-gardening — weren't more fleshed out. 

But, admirably, this novel shows how three women manage to sidestep capitalism. A little.

Giselle said she had stopped identifying as an artist, but she still worked. Art work is work, it's labor. So is working in a café. It's all the same thing.

Something is lost here

But something is lost here. While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty. In Intercourse (1987) Andrea Dworkin warned of just this:

Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which in only — pathetically — a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses.

If sex education sought to endow young people not just with better "rote responses" but with an emboldened sexual imagination — the capacity to bring forth "new meanings, new forms" — it would have to be, I think, a kind of negative education. It wouldn't assert its authority to tell the truth about sex, but rather remind young people that the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them. Sex can, if they choose, remain as generations before them have choses: violent, selfish and unequal. Or sex can — if they choose — be something more joyful, more equal, freer. 

— from "Talking to My Students about Porn," in The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan.

(What would it be like to discover sex with a wholly open mind, with child-like innocence, without media influence? Instead, we live in a world where porn is now if not ubiquitous then very readily acquired. Granted, my generation sneaked peeks at girly magazines stashed in their dads' garages and  videos pilfered from adult-only backrooms. Sometimes I think I would've benefited from an education of this sort, beyond the romance and passion modeled for me by mainstream film and television. But it's all so performative, so results-oriented; and even when it's different, it's same same.)

The essays in The Right to Sex cover #MeToo, incels, porn, sex positivity, race, TERFs, sex work, carceralism. Clearly, sex is political. Mostly accessibly written, veering slightly into the overly academic, many of the issues described here are at the heart of today's feminist thinking. Endless questions raised, no clear answers offered. 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn't imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

Essays
Does anyone have the right to sex?"  
Who lost the sex wars? 

Reviews
Is a new book feminism’s next new wave or yesterday’s backlash?  
Who Gets to Be Desirable?  
Questioning Desire 

I didn't know what I wanted

The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake, transported me across time, space, and culture. Set in the 1970s (odd to call it a historical novel when it describes events within my lifetime), it has a peculiar quality of feeling true to its time — that is, I felt like I was discovering a decades-old novel inspired by real-life events, not reading recent release fiction.

My parents didn't know anything about university. My father hadn't even gone to high school — he'd had to start working right after his father died of a heart attack. More and more young people were going to college, though, and my mother wanted for me what other parents did for their children. Yet because it was a foreign world — a world she and my father were afraid of — they could offer no advice or direct encouragement. As a result, they could only give me mixed messages that reflected the confusion and insecurity they themselves felt. It's good to go to university, but university is only for rich people; you deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, but home is best and there are lots of jobs you could do with a high school diploma; and so on, back a forth.

I didn't know what I wanted, either. I was a mediocre student, the kind who was too conscientious not to do my homework but not smart enough to get good marks despite my efforts. I never failed but I never excelled. 

Akemi leaves home to study medical illustration in Tokyo. At the girls' boarding house where her lodging was arranged, she quickly becomes enamored of its most elusive (and somewhat disreputable) resident, Sayoko, an art student from a wealthy family.

Akemi struggles to assert her independence from her family, to see some of the world beyond her small village and study with the aim of establishing a career. Sayoko on the other hand is used to having her wishes granted, sees no need for school, and aspires to a wholly bohemian lifestyle.

We witness Sayoko bossing Akemi around and taking her friendship for granted, but Akemi is too fascinated to be able to extricate herself. 

Things turn strange when Sayoko meets an older couple. They are "artists" who stage happenings; they stay in Sayoko's apartment, and for a while it seems their lives are an endless orgy of alcohol and cigarettes, possibly sex, and just a soupçon of art. And then they're gone.

When Sayoko resurfaces and invites Akemi to one of their happenings in the wilderness, we see that the couple's charisma has cult-like proportions and things may not end well.

This novel is essentially Akemi's coming-of-age story, focusing on the nature of the girls' friendship, and its transience. But with a firm grounding in 1970s Japanese counterculture, it also explores the nature of art (and its transience) and what it is to live an artist lifestyle. 

Excerpt.
Interview, with excerpt.

Activity as volumetric thinker

Looking up at the heavens she howled and cried until she grew hoarse, but even after her voice had given out, her whole body continued to shake. If only she could become a sculpture. Though she had produced many drawings and prints, she had know that she was meant to be a sculptor since her youth. And now, the only way to escape this pain was to become a sculpture herself.

— from 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

1. Can I call myself an artist? Yes. Apparently I am emerging. Some of my sculptures are on display at the Montreal Art Center and Museum, June 8-22.

Women sculptors have often been single figures, whose very activity as volumetric thinkers caused consternation. (Penelope Curtis)

2. What am I trying to prove? And I am certain I am trying to prove something. I am, however, not sure if it is to the world or to myself, or to someone else. This is a partial proof that anyone can be an artist. If I can do it, surely anyone can. Or at least anyone who takes the time to respond to a call for submissions, prepare a portfolio and a statement. Anyone who can manage the logistics of exhibiting one's work. Alternatively it is proof that I have some artistic talent. Can both hypotheses be true?

3. Having the goal of exhibition has shaped my time. There are deadlines. Paint must dry. These past months have been exceptionally stress-laden, for life reasons, yet I made a commitment to participate in a group exhibit — an added pressure, but also a distraction from life, even a handy excuse.

4. Would these sculptures have turned out differently without a looming end date? Minimally. In some cases, a decision was forced. I no longer had the luxury of procrastination. But the right decisions were made, of this I am confident. 

5. Some finishing detail was rushed. As I browse work in galleries, I notice the precision I didn't make time for — a sanded contour, a crisper edge, a neater mounting. Such detail can be a differentiator between competent work and confident work. While parts of the process are meditative and slow down time, I need to relearn patience, I need to take more time.

6. How do I title a sculpture? A title can change everything. It gives the viewer a framework, it sets a tone. An artwork must announce itself to the world. It takes a stance. It makes a statement. It tells a story. Sometimes it's an untitled story about nothing in particular.

7. I play a game with myself when I visit galleries and museums: I look at an artwork cold, understand something about it, identify how it makes me feel; then I read the little white label at its side, for its title, year, materials, maybe some other context. And then I look again. This game makes me feel like both a winner and a loser simultaneously, that I am some clever purist exercising her cumulative knowledge and insight but also never fully appreciating what an artist might be trying to say. Is the failing mine or the artist's, I wonder.

8. They say a picture's worth a thousand words. What is a sculpture worth then? Why do we title artworks with words? An artwork can generate a feeling; but a title can help the artwork tell a story. Sometimes I think the title should be able to stand on its own, without the artwork.

9. I read artist statements and laugh at their empty wordiness. I have collected many sample over the years. Enough to fill a book.

10. How do I price a sculpture? Unlike a canvas, I cannot charge by square inch. I can calculate time and materials, but what of found materials? Do I count the time involved for mould-making on top of the time to make the clay original? If I reuse the mould, should I adjust the price? 

11. What is my artwork worth to me? What do I want for it? At this point, mostly I want someone to take it off my hands. I'm not in this for the money. I like the idea of barter pricing, because some things are more useful to me than money. One sculpture is priced at "Removal and disposal of two old hot water tanks from the artist's cellar basement, accessed via trap door and steep step ladder." Another costs "Air duct and dryer vent cleaning in the artist's condo, which may include the removal of animal remains and other debris." But it's only because I'm financially comfortable that I can entertain alternative economic structures.

12. Curatorial philosophies and logistics are confounding me. How do I choose what to display? How many pieces? How do I display them? Painters must choose how to frame their paintings; sculptors must stage their work, in three dimensions. I put my work on a pedestal. Should these platforms conform to each other to forge (a perhaps artificial) cohesiveness of the sculptures, or should they play to each piece's distinctiveness?

13. Where do I find such pedestals? Do I make them, modify them? How do I transport them? How much time have I devoted to the material that supports the art, beyond making the art itself?

Object-sculpture is by it nature materially and spatially assertive, so a sculptor needs logistical and material support as well as the endorsement of others who believe in the undertaking. (Clare Lilley)

14. Here's a smattering of books I've read in recent months (rather, almost years), either directly or tangentially about art and artists, that have shaped some of my art thinking, bringing me to where I am now.

• Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945, published on the occasion of the Arts Council Collection Exhibition
• Old in Art School, A Memoir of Starting Over, by Nell Painter
• Like a Sky Inside, by Jakuta Alikavazovic
• Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey
• The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession, by Michael Finkel
• The Deceptions, by Jill Bialosky
• Tell Me I'm an Artist, by Chelsea Martin
• Sirens and Muses, by Antonia Angress
• The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake
• The Exhibitionist, by Charlotte Mendelson
• 3 Streets, by Yoko Tawada

15. Why do writers have so much to say about art?

16. There is so much more I want to say about these books, but I'm not sure I remember what. I read differently now. I regret not blogging, not documenting my response, not writing my way through my opinions. 

17. I've been messing around, playing with art, toying with the idea of art school; if not a degreed program, then workshops in exotic places. What do I hope to accomplish with school? More proof, validation? (Of what?) More importantly, what do I hope to learn?

18. I don't even know how to properly clean a paint brush.

19. I have been making things out of clay and, for the most part, casting them. I want to learn about different casting materials. How do I even begin to go about casting bronze? Where do I get some bronze? Can the things I do with clay be adapted for ceramics? How do different types of clay feel, or behave differently? I have trouble finding answers in books or on the internet. I suspect the answers may come from people, possibly school. I want to experiment with materials, to find the material best suited to the story I want to tell.

20. Perhaps I want to prove that art is easier than literature. The price of admission is lower. It's easy to show my work at the little gallery down the street. People actually stop and look. It's less simple to publish a book. There is no little publisher around the corner. There aren't many people who will casually spend 20 minutes with my writing and spend a few hundred or thousand dollars on it.

21. Perhaps this exercise in art was a warm-up. Or merely a procrastination tactic.

Exhibitions are not the end point of a process. Exhibitions start things, and they begin processes of change and reassessment. They don't close a chapter but open it. (Joy Sleeman)

Gaping holes in the body of her argument, 2024; clay, acrylic. On the beach at Benitses, she came apart at the seams, 2022; plaster, acrylic. 
The body is a construct, the body is a triangle, 2023; hydrostone. Jeremy is a delicate flower, 2024; clay, plaster, acrylic.

An infinitely more physical way to touch

There was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of touching without touch.

Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical way to touch. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener. The tongue grows dry, saliva spatters, the lips crack. 

Why does one thing resonate when another leaves me cold? Greek Lessons, by Han Kang, is an exquisite thing.

The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.

Why do I love this book? Maybe because it is about language. Maybe because it is about beauty, and favours the ephemeral over the eternal, turning Plato inside out. Maybe because it is cosmopolitan and urban, but intimate and quotidian. It reminds me of being in Greece. It reminds me of learning German. It reminds me of now. It makes me want to write. It makes me want to sculpt. It makes me cry. It puzzles me, how it unfurls.

Maybe because I read (most of) it on a plane. A friend of mine claims watching movies on a plane is a more intensely emotional experience, and I keep meaning to google this allegation, ascertain its science. Maybe it’s the same for books, only there are books I recall reading in flight that were less memorable, or at least memorably not enjoyable (which perhaps proves the point?). Maybe because I’m so high above the ground, I have a god's eye view, a richer appreciation of the earthly. (It turns out it's the air pressure, lower oxygen levels in the brain.)

I want to forgive this book everything. At about halfway (days ago, while still earthbound, nursing my ailing mother) I felt confused, but also swept away. I wanted to make sure, really sure, I understood everything, so I started over.

I want to read it again now.

He teaches Ancient Greek and is going blind. He pines for his first love, when his family lived in Germany; he regrets how rebuffed another friend. 

She is unable to speak, a response to trauma, not for the first time in her life. She's mourning her mother, but perhaps also grieving her own life. Divorced, she's lost custody of her son.  

How can these two people break through their isolation and connect?

I will for a few days come back to the thought that maybe I should study Ancient Greek (or some similarly inconsequential language), or that I should be crafting poetry. I expect this impulse will fade entirely within the week, but part of me hopes it doesn't.

I think about the lovely turns of phrase I’d like to borrow, to use as titles for sculptures I’ve yet to mould: "My eyelids quiver like stridulating insect wings." (The sensation he feels repeats her earlier state of being. "The woman’s eyelids tremble. Like insects’ wings rubbing briskly together.") "I will see the fabric of darkness, unraveled into bluish threads, wind about the city." "The latter part of his life began, which could not be called anything but a chaotic mess."

Now and then, words would thrust their way into her sleep like skewers, startling her awake several times a night. She got less and less sleep, was increasingly overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, and sometimes an inexplicable pain burned against her solar plexus like a metal brand. 

The most agonizing thing was how horrifyingly distinct the words sounded when she opened her mouth and pushed them out one by one. Even the most nondescript phrase outlined completeness and incompleteness, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, with the cold clarity of ice. Spun out white as spider's silk from her tongue and by her hand, those sentences were shameful. She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream.

There is clay, and there is touch throughout this book (and the colour blue). "Her face is thin and drawn, like the elongated features of certain clay sculptures." Touchpoints for me. "The flesh remembers." "A brighter and more concentrated stillness filled the dark clay jar of her body."

The sadness of the human body. The human body, with its many indented, tender, vulnerable parts. The forearms. The armpits. The chest. The groin. A body born to embrace someone, to desire to embrace someone.

We are earthy, and earthly. Everything we do or say has physicality. Language is physical. This physicality that Kang emphasizes makes everything sensual.

She no longer thought in language. She moved without language and understood without language — as it had been before she learned to speak, no, before she had obtained life, silence, absorbing the flow of time like balls of cotton, enveloper her body both outside and in.

The man across the aisle is playing chess. I am sad that I have no one to play chess with, or backgammon. This week I wondered if I could teach my mother to play backgammon, and then I rejected the idea. I consider playing chess online, at least it will exercise my thinking, my logic, my projection into the future, more than my daily sudoku anyway. I think about whether I prefer the blue labyrinth of the UK cover or the hexagonal pencil in cross section of the North American cover.

("She just didn't like taking up space. Everyone occupies a certain amount of physical space according to their body mass, but voice travels far beyond that. She had no wish to disseminate her self.")

Sometimes she thinks of herself as more like some form of substance, a moving solid or liquid, than like a person. When she eats hot rice, she feels that she herself becomes that rice, and when she washes her face with cold water there is no distinction between her and that water. At the same time she knows that she is neither rice nor water, but some harsh, solid substance that will never commingle with any being, living or otherwise.

Excerpt.
"The Middle Voice"

It's not a fetish, it's a belief system

how had some people worked it out made kink a natural part of their lives that was the dream was it to assimilate kink into capitalism along with everything else that was once subversive the forces were pushing up against each other true peak capitalism wanted everything it wanted the queers it wanted to market vodka to trans girls it wanted fetish weekend breaks but it had been brought about through alliance with a resurgence of right-wing religious Christian zealotry & these two forces once aligned somewhat were now starting to rub against one another creating painful friction because those zealots hated the degenerates but those capitalists were like the degenerates are a valuable market share you didn't want to be part of that & anyway the fetishes that were successfully or semi-successfully for now embraced by capitalism in the brief time before the neo-reactionary uprisings well those fetishes weren't even close to the thing you liked

Definitely one of the weirder, non-mainstream stories I've read in some time. (Thank you, Tournament of Books!) I don't think I can recommend it to anybody. (Except Vincent. And Leslee. Maybe Yann, and Nancy. But not you, I don't really know you.) Some people would be thoroughly disgusted by it. It's classified as body horror, if you're into those kinds of labels, which personally I don't really understand. But I couldn't put it down.

She'd pissed on a few men, once for money. It was hard to describe what was fun about it. In a way, it was easier to understand what was hot about being pissed on — that was so degrading, so filthy. But pissing on someone ... the pisser is dominant, but pissing itself is a moment of pure vulnerability. It's about loss of control. The power dynamics were more complicated than they appeared to outsiders.

Brainwyrms, by Alison Rumfitt, is set in  a highly transphobic near future. Political acts of terrorism are commonplace. Social media posts are scrutinized for questionable behaviour. It's also a love story, exposing the (literally) parasitic nature of relationships, and for this reason and others it's heartbreakingly sad.

The novel follows two main perspectives: Frankie (she/her) is a trans woman with an impregnation fetish, and a victim of terrorism, who falls hard for Vanya and tries desperately not to fuck it up. Vanya (they/them) is young and beautiful and has a dark secret, and their stream of consciousness narration is thoroughly unsettling. 

Vanya's mother also figures prominently, representing TERFism. The public face of the activist group she's involved in is a children's author clearly based on JK Rowling. 

People take fetish and kink seriously, they treat it as a lifestyle and structure their existence around it. There are many people in communities on the internet who essentially are engaged in fetish that would never think of it as such. There are communities of men online who obsess over cigars, their phalic shapes, the feeling of having them in their mouths, and they may never realise what that really means. They might never even get off on it properly. There are communities of people who dress up in Red Army costumes who don't fuck one another — and yet ... fetishes can burst out of the specific easy boundaries they are put in and overcome the entire self. They can become an ideology. Gaz was one of them. It was not enough to simply get infected. It couldn't just be that. It had to be something more. It had to have some wider meaning or what was the fucking point? You nestled into him to keep warm and he wrapped you close to his body underneath his oversized coat. He smelled of sweat and weed. I'll keep you safe, he said. You believed him because right then you couldn't bear not to.

This novel depicts a future grounded in today's fear, intolerance, and closed-mindedness fascism, while it pokes and prods at our tender spots. 

What is intimacy? What is pleasure, what is pain, why do we do what we do, why do we seek what we seek? Do we seek to escape reality, resolve past trauma, fulfill our human potential? Who are we when we are naked before ourselves? 

Transformation. Self-realization. Simply being is transgressive. Being is political.

Time drips off our bodies

She says I'm like those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element. No one knows where they came from. Not even they understand how they're still standing and why they never break down.

This is why she calls her Boulder. 

Boulder, by Eva Baltasar, was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker. The cover is stunning. Weirdly, I spotted this book at a local magazine chain store, which sells only a few dozen titles in English. So I was inspired to finally check it out.

Highly poetic. It feels wrought. A narrator whom I found entirely unsympathetic; she's a bit of a selfish dick, really. 

The eponymous Boulder, a loner, a literal drifter, a merchant ship worker. 

An old woman passes me the bottle with a smile in each eye and a toothless grin. I take it and drink. I love this place, thee narrow black eyes that neither desire me not reject me, this fabulous freedom.

But she meets Samsa and falls in love.

Time drips off our bodies, trickles between our legs, we tack it to the walls.

They move to Reykjavik and buy a house. (But they could've lived anywhere. Icelandishness does not really play into this novel, except for the narrator observing that "Icelanders are slaves to biology, breeders," which I'm not convinced it true.)

Boulder is about a relationship that changes when prospective parenthood enters the equation, and then some more with an actual baby.

It's Samsa who's desperate to have a child. Boulder acquiesces, but she is increasingly at a remove from Samsa, even while watching her with desire.

She's having an Italian morning, her body is soft and full, she smells like fresh bread, like a sponge left in the sun, like tomato plants.

Although Boulder depicts a same-sex relationship, the challenges, particularly those of physical intimacy, are typical of any marriage. (I'm not sure what makes this an "incisive story of queer love" other than it's like any other kind of love?)

It vividly brought back to me the anger, exhaustion, resentment of the early years of motherhood, with all the negativity stemming from and directed back at my (now ex) partner. I mean, I relate to the biological mother in this story, and I'm raging at the narrator for closing themself off, for making excuses, for being self-centred and weak (and in my case, I believe, ultimately inconsequential).

I realize there's a living thing seated inside me; in fact it's lounging around and whistling as it watches the sky slowly descend as if dancing. I'm always surprised by the lack of guilt in that place where love, which always pushes outward, meets solitude, which always pulls inward. My love doesn't leave with Samsa, but it isn't part of me either. It belongs to desire. 

Although the novel clearly tapped into a particular point in my past experience, this style of writing (imagine a poetry reading; hear the affectation and portentousness) is not my cup of tea. I can't think of any individuals to whom I'd recommend this book, but on the other hand it could make for a rich bookclub discussion. 

Excerpt.