On Nakedness
This could be read as an artist statement, an institutional critique, or for the hell of it.
Back in kindergarten, a kid told me, you know, you are naked under your clothes.
And so is America. I mean America the living thing that is made up of the laboring, and the migrating, and the fighting, and the love making. And the waiting in lines and the driving of cars. The living things that feel and move on its behalf. They have to find ways to live in spaces that are not made for them, as they are making them. These places that were made to be passed through or passed by. Sometimes the living thing grows around the structure, and sometimes she presses against it until one of them breaks. She keeps building it.
Try to look at it like a witness. Not the way that a medical expert looks at the situation. A witness is not the same as an observer, or anything else that pretends to be outside the rules of living and dying. A witness is somebody who sees another person naked, remembering that they are naked under their clothes too.
But this here is not really America. This is a made-up place I am making.
I thought that there were no ceremonies in this place. But that may be all it is. Even though it is not the kind that always takes itself very seriously. A ceremony is different than performance. It’s a question of sacredness, which might also be the difference between nudity and nakedness.
Volcanos lead to the inside of the Earth. The sky begins around eye level. As far as I can tell there isn’t any apocalypse, because there is no such thing as a real beginning or end. Life is always dying and making itself again.
But not in the language of Hollywood movies.
The thing about movies is that they have beginnings and ends, and the main characters have self-hoods, as long as things are going well, and the woman characters have woman-hoods, or maybe they have self-hoods. A nude body that looks one way means sex. A nude body that looks another way means horror. Everybody is a character, and everything about a character’s presentation signifies something. The same is true of the world around them. That is okay, but that is not how it is in real life, and that is not what I am trying to do.
Sometimes people see the implication of violence or disaster or suffering when they look at my paintings. I do not see this myself. I suspect that some people are reading into the absence of self-presentation, or the lack of a certain kind of aesthetic, and thinking that something terrible must be happening. That could make sense, if it was to be read in the language of Hollywood movies.
But disaster is only one thing that can make a life exist separate from its name. Not all nakedness is victimhood.
And not all choice is freedom, and not all speech is power.
Why should violence have a monopoly on nakedness. The theatrics of forced exposure is empty. The theatrics of opposition. One being revealed, being touched, being fucked, being killed. The affording and denying of status. The text on the museum wall that supposedly has no author. This story is not complete. The one on the top is not what they say they are, they are only using the other’s nakedness to deny their own. What a disappointment it is, if you were looking for that kind of a drama. When it turns out that everybody living is also dying. And the un-specialness of this. It is not particular to any individual. It’s the most ordinary thing you can do, it just happens in a different way every time.
Ugliness is another a way of being un-curated, without name. Ugliness on a screen symbolizes a lack of humanity, or a lack of sanity, or a lack of intelligence, or a lack of depth, or a lack of power, or a lack of kindness, or a lack of joy, or a lack of vitality, or something, but not on a screen, ugliness is just what it is. The absence of a certain kind of outward-facing self. The absence of second layer of skin which has come to be expected, particularly on females.
What if a person just decides not to wear it. What if someone decides that no matter what they do, they are subject to misunderstanding and misrepresentation, even by themselves, and that they are too small for a name, and that they are too big for a name. I don’t have anything to reveal, my guess is as good as yours. It happens all the time, in the in between seconds, and those are what I am describing.
How would you know to put tourism and migration in such different worlds, and ignore all of those strange things in between? The aesthetics of each one is reflected in the other. Look at how the industries and the infrastructure that support one must suddenly be adapted to support the other, because a political tectonic plate has shifted. Poverty is defined as how much money you have (a dollar and ninety cents) not how much money you need. The baseline is based on a misunderstanding.
Sometimes there are giants. Back in kindergarten, a kid told me, you know, bears are really big. How big? Well, they are the size of the whole world. Everybody can be that big sometimes, and other times, you are just a little fragment. But you wouldn’t even know that if you had all the clothes on.
I’ve been told that people are stupid. Maybe part of that is because people will compose a story of almost anything. And they can be incredibly wrong. But you could share a whole world with someone else just by describing a living thing and a place, and a relationship between them. If you can only shed from storytelling the question of validity.
I have been told that people are so smart, they don’t even need an explanation as to why. I hope that you were right about that, Queen of Fakes.
How do you recon with this shiny purple tower. It seems to have no history, no layers, no smell. It is not mentioned in any ballad. It promises to never grow old or fall apart. Falling apart is scary. The tower is scary too. I try not to be afraid of either one, because they are inevitable. It is the dissonance this tower breeds in people that is the real culprit. So I look for proof of something that breathes underneath it. You are standing in the tower. But if you look all the way over there, just down the hill from that highway that has a hole blown in it, there is another tower just like it. Well, it turns out that it isn’t the same tower, and it’s not even purple. But in your mind, it was, just for a minute, just long enough to catch some stranger sister’s breath on your tongue.