my heroes died of syphilis

Xanadu: A Stately Pleasure Dome

Erin Shafkind has curated what may be my favorite show of the year so far. Of course, my judgment is clouded by anticipation and the fact that I'm contributing a piece to the show, but there's no denying the compulsive splendor of cacophonous neon lights and roller-skate-glam that also underscores dialogue about utopia and the artistic process. I've previewed a few of the works in person: Troy Gua's ethereal, prismatic portrait of Olivia Newton-John as Kira is breathtaking; I can't wait to see Klara Glosova's crumpled clay skates or the Alpert/Arkley video.

My piece is a drawing called Glory, Utopia (the head of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the body of Terpischore). In a world where there's nothing new under the sun, this may be the world's first ever six foot tall scratch 'n sniff drawing of a hermaphrodite. Correct me if I'm wrong.

The Prime Minister of Poland died in a plane crash the week I began working on this piece. I'd intended to approach the subject of Xanadu with something of an ubuesque, dystopian eye, so when news of the smoldering Prime Minister of Poland (that is to say, Nowhere) arrived, I felt I was perhaps not on the wrong track. This Rubenesque hermaphroditic unicorn is at its worst/best an Ecclesiastical vanitas, at its best/worst the incarnation of a nonsense-spewing hydrocephalic baboon, bubbling over with genital excess and blue areola. In far darker times (Foucault suggests in his preface to Herculine Barbin) real hermaphrodites were summarily executed for their duplicitous, shifting identities, grotesque sexualities, and ineffectual reproductive organs. The blue-nippled fantasies of societies and artists alike are less frequently executed, but perhaps as consistently ineffectual at producing mature, virile fruit (having short vaginal cul-de-sacs that lead to Nowhere).

Christ's wandering uterus

"[Big] Christ's wandering uterus"
graphite & vellum

I recently finished a new piece that's been gestating in my mind for a while. It hadn't struck me to make a visual depiction of Christ as a hysteric until long after I'd written a handful of "meditations" on Christ's wandering uterus. The concept for the text (as stated in the title) derives primarily from Huysmans' florid description of Grünewald's Crucifixion in his novel Là-Bas, and secondarily from his narrative of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam and his musings on syphilis.

It's hardly a stretch to situate Christ at the center of this decadent pathography - at the center of a triangulation of syphilis, hysteria, and mysticism; it's even quite natural.

Here's a sample; if you want the rest, you can find them here.

Meditations on Christ's wandering uterus (or Christ as hysteric), based on Huysmans' writings concerning Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion.

mardi
Mardi: On Tuesdays, the Greek physicians believed, the uterus lodged itself in the throat, which accounted for a sense of choking, or globus hystericus. When the doctor pushed a finger into Christ's throat, he could feel the uterine wall pushing back, warm and firm.

(The doctor has placed a fetid herb on his tongue and asked him to swallow it. Supposedly, to inhale the aromas of this plant would effect a movement of the uterus downward from the throat towards its normal position, above the testes.)

videos of a lamb's tongue

I posted photos of my little bibelot a few weeks ago, and finally edited some video fragments to share (filming by Damon Mori):





occasional notes written during the sewing:

The hemorrhaging of a ruffled muscle (and its protruding) out between the walls of the mouth:
The ruffled mouth
The ruffled effusion of sinews which stretch like pearlescent tissue between anchor points on the brown bone
(ectoplasm)

. When I began, the tongue was plump and cold. To feel it warming between my fingers is to feel it gently decomposing, and across the span of days I can feel the tissue gradually weakening, as the frayed ends of my threads dissolve into invisible but still troubling knotted filliments, which cannot easily be traced let alone undone. I am sewing first of all clusters of nailheads, then slowly adding little starbursts, lozenges, pyramids, and hearts. Lots of little multi-faceted hearts of all sizes lacquering and twinkling and eventually obfuscating the mat of furry pearly papillae.

. the tongue (lamb's tongue is a common flower name)
the tongue as symbol and center of speech, of sexual acts, of innocence (the lamb), of innocence dead (the butchered dinner), of symbol and/as language, of nourishment, of hysterical gesture (the tongue jutted out from the mouth spasmodically - contracture de la langue provoquee a l'etat de veille chez une hystérique par reflexe auriculaire), the Lamb of God, Mary's little lamb, the black sheep --- against positivist materialism and rational discourse and towards symbolic materialism and irrational discourse.

. The week I turned thirteen I was in attendance at a religious camp where kids were taught to speak in tongues -- -- I felt the terrible flush of shame and disappointment at not being immediately gifted with this lavish proof of inhabitation at the first test, and then being instructed to open my mouth and move my tongue freely between the teeth, around the sweating walls of my mouth, to speak without making meaning, to take flight from reason or thought, I finally reached a climax of bodily dissolution that released the logorrhea I desperately desired.

If I now open my mouth to speak the blessed blue glossolalia (you could say: the purplest prose of all) I get syllables that read like a broken record, like con-oh-rosso-shana-la-ma-shee-kee-moh-da-da, which is redoubling with a hidden text which is a blaspheming of the Holy Spirit.

The speaker gifted with glossolalia is able to fill, simply and ineffably; this tongue, cut loose from its cerebral moorings, is the perfect beastly libertine, purely and perfectly filling, spilling over with gibberish excess, a nonsensical paroxysm of filling without being or meaning, this filling which is a hobbyhorse of grief, which would, if unbridled, drive all men mad into the ground, their inner thighs rubbed pink and blossoming and unfurling with a hundred hairy splinters, an ecstatic, childish, pullulating rash, which resembles in the hot brightness of its bloom the pink of a mouth from which nothing enters, nothing issues, its emptiness described by the absence of a tongue barbarically cut out, where everything is perfectly described in endless mystery languages.

bibelot, tongue aetheticized and fetishized, (aboli even)

I've indulged in whimsy lately, regarding tongues. A few months ago I began dabbling in lamb tongues, ogling them at the market, then buying them, then handling them and modifying them. One image was stuck in my head for ages -- of a tongue covered completely in a haphazard lacework of archaic jet glass. The jet beads, most of which are about a hundred years old, many removed from disintegrating clothing, were individually stitched onto the tongue till the top was more or less obfuscated.
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When I was very young on a Halloween my father dressed up in a heavy robe and laid out a spooky Halloween dinner on a sideboard in the attic of our church. He had before him a bowl filled with freezing cold grapes, which he said were eyeballs (we were told to plunge our hands in). He had a plate heaped with cold twining noodles, which he said were brains. And finally he had laid out on a platter a monstrous long cow's tongue, as long as my forearm, the top of which was rough like stiff, cold fur to the touch.















More images here.