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Too many things in my life live outside the realm of words, and one of those things is words themselves. They belong to the world outside, where things make sense. They’re beautiful, sensual, a dream that life can be comprehensible, a promise that breaks itself. According to the Bible they’re as old as God, and even God themselves: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But even there they’re human too. “The Word became flesh,” John continues breathlessly, “and made their dwelling among us.”
The contradiction is important: I may not be capable of religion, but I am capable of love. And for how much I love words, it’s true that we’ve never really been there for each other when we’ve needed it. It’s a messy, on-again, off-again situationship that started in a speech therapist’s office, dragged itself through a cult, a closet, a borderline-courtship, old pathologies, new pathologies, paradigm shift after paradigm shift, until we’re stripped down and faced with the undisguised truth of each other. Words fail me, and I resent having to live up to them. What do you do with that? Do you stay?
I just spent half an hour wrapping the motion sensors
On my studio lightswitch with electrical tape
So the fluorescents wouldn’t turn on unless I asked. There’s two huge windows in the wall
That face the sunlight and I really don’t see
Why the lights need to know where I am
When I have the two hands that god gave me
To flip a damn lightswitch.
There’s this TV show I’ve watched a dozen times,
About a lesbian who keeps another girl’s photo in her locket
But can’t say her name out loud. Men
Taunt her about it but she refuses
To answer them or be perceived–
But we, the audience, obviously know
Because we’re watching her through our panopticon screens,
And she’s the one who’s paying the price.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that queerness lives in silence
So it can’t be refuted. There’s something to that:
Does love have a choice when it’s stuck inside a love story?
I should write about my art now. At some point I have to admit
I’ll never draw anything as good as my preschool drawings again
(2004, marker and crayon on construction paper)
I drew houses and people. I didn’t know
What linear perspective was back then
And I’ve been mourning that innocence ever since.
Years ago my thesis advisor told me
(As she x-ed out another “very” with her red pen)
I remind her of Jesus: transfiguring the suffering
Of the maker, the audience, the watcher and watched
But I don’t want to die for everyone else’s sins!
I want to die for my own!
Once there was a girl who fell out of a boat
And a boy jumped into the water to save her
But was swept away instead.
And when the girl tried to remember his name
She realized it hadn’t been her in the boat after all—
He’d died for something else, and she’s been
Screaming for help from the shore all along.
Or, once there was a kid who really liked stories
At the edge of an absence she couldn’t name. She haunted her own life, transparent, bodiless
Not recognizing themselves in a face or a mirror
Till the poem ended. Diagnostic criteria:
A. B. C. D. Persistent difficulties in the social use of verbal and nonverbal communication as manifested by all of the following:
1. Deficits in using communication for social purposes, such as greeting and sharing
information, in a manner that is appropriate for the social context.
I’ve been looking at my own damn art for
So many hours, sewing and stitching and
Sawing and stapling like I’m some Frankenstein
But the monster I’m making isn’t a downtrodden philosopher,
It’s a wall. Or maybe a Jacob’s ladder
Or a mourning locket.
The point is, you’re sewing a seam / you’re plastering a wall / you’re drawing a line / you’re sanding a 2×4,
You’re the maker and made and everything spirals back into itself.
If you lie down flat on your back in a fireplace,
Sometimes you see a sliver of sky.
Well. That’s the idea anyway.
The Venetian blinds in my bedroom let in just enough sunlight
That it wakes me up, but not enough
That my room becomes a panopticon cell at night.
My landlord wants me to use the “back stairs”
Until the paint on our front stairs dries,
But bitch. The back stairs?
You mean the fire escape?
As it turns out the door to the fire escape
Doesn’t unlock for any of my keys–
Even though I asked it very nicely–
So the door has remained unlocked all day so I can get back in.
And all I can do is hope
That some stranger on the street doesn’t realize
My home is wide open for the taking
But it’s fine.
• Venetian blinds
• Plaster gauze
• Fire hazard sticker
• Rosemary
• Wool string
• VHS tape player
• Pantyhose
• Vinegar
• Smarties candies
• House paint
• Clear quartz
• Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich
• Crayon
• Stool legs
• Cinnamon
• Neon pink plastic pencil case
• TV static
• Vertebrae
• Polyfill, in unopened packaging • Window
• Adolescence of Utena (1999)
• Salt
• Architectural floorplans
• Glass shards
• Electro-magnetic reader
• Candy wrappers
• Time stamps
• Candle
• Printer paper and tacks
• Elevator plans
• Slide projector slides
• Mint from my adopted grandmother’s garden
• Whiteboard marker
• Film reels
• Water
• 46 chromosomes
• White sheet
• Audacity
A curator came in my studio the other day and asked me what should’ve been a simple question. Simple to a curator, anyway–no artist I’ve ever talked to has been able to answer this question sincerely.
“What is your artistic practice about?”
I speedran through denial, pleading, anger and despair, and after a second of staring blankly at her, accepted that she probably wanted an answer.
“Well, right now I’m trying to work in as many different modes and do as much research as possible, but I’m in- terested in the relational structures people use to organize physical reality and how these structures become socialized and naturalized.” I thought I sounded pretty smart. She did not.
“That’s interesting. What is your process like?”
Right now? Or in general? The other day I found a huge office-window-sized Venetian blind in my materials pile, still wrapped for shipment in plastic wrap. I’d grabbed it from the dumpster of an antique mall weeks ago and forgotten about it. Now that I was on a tight deadline, I dug it out again and realized that the plastic wrap was behaving a lot like plaster gauze: it stretches, crinkles, clings to itself, curls in at the edges, and tangles itself into an unusable burl if you so much as breathe on it wrong. Wrapping the blinds in plastic wrap reinforces their purpose to be unwrapped, unfolded, and hung for privacy. But perform the same process in plaster gauze, and you’re setting them like a broken limb. Those blinds can’t cover anything: they’re there to be cured of their function, to be covered themselves in a way that exposes their incapacity for privacy.
Now that’s interesting. But the second I finished my diatribe on blinds, she told me: “This is a good conversation, but nothing of what you said tells me anything about your work or your artistic practice.”
I tried again three times: “I’ve been researching queer ephemerality and simulating the inverse relationship between information and embodiment with VHS tape wear,” and “I’ve been making freehand drawings inspired by religious compositions that I use to process research,” and “I’ve been setting up social experiments with pared-down assemblages and studying how people move to interpret them.” And I’d only been here three months, and she was the third person to critique my work that day, and my car had broken down that morning, and I had a nasty cold, and I’d left my water bottle at home, and I was running out of excuses. So finally I gave up and told her the truth:
“I have no fucking idea what this is all for.”
I sat down to write some pretentious essay about art, but two minutes in I got a text that my friend got hit by a car. She’s okay–she’s okay, I know she’s okay–but the art has flown straight from my head.
If you’re experiencing frequent disconnections, try these troubleshooting tips:
* Restart: This is the simplest and most effective way to resolve connection issues. Restarting can resolve issues with congestion, conflict, and failure.
* Update: Ensure your knowledge is up to date, as outdated information can cause connection issues.
* Check outside: Go outside or on social media to find other disconnects in your area.
* Boost your connection: Find the nearest open body of water and consider throwing your phone in it.
I attended two churches growing up, one Southern Baptist and one Presbyterian. Both of these denominations are pretty straight-laced when it comes to supernatural experiences. We didn’t have New Age spiritual practices like faith healing or speaking in tongues, or even historical mystic traditions like invoking saints and transubstantiation. What we did have were gifts of the Holy Spirit. Classified into manifestational, functional, and vocational callings, the list of gifts ranged from wisdom to intercession to administration to speaking in tongues. I was automatically classified into “acts of service” as a teenage girl on the worship team. But the gift I took most pride in was prophecy: the ability to speak God’s word through divine inspiration.
Unfortunately it’s not as cool as it sounds. Our church believed that genuine miracles stopped happening in the first century A.D.. Without the supernatural aspect, it just meant I was good at saying things people needed to hear. That said, the ordinary magic of communication was not something I took for granted as someone who’d been non-verbal until preschool, and I’d been actively studying how to work a room since then. Combined with unwavering conviction, basic empathy, and a complete inability to keep my mouth shut, I had the perfect recipe for words of the Spirit. I could tell any amount of stories about being approached for advice by adults, or convincing middle schoolers that God will love them if they “struggle with homosexuality,” or giving testimonies about the Lord working through the vessel of my body as I dissociated my way through high school.
The more interesting uses for these skills, though, have been outside the cult. I’ve found that within an artistic practice, the conviction and self-assurance I developed translate into a striking ability to bring ideas into existence through sheer willpower. Is making art mystical? Is it prophetic? Is it psychological? Is it not that deep? It sure feels miraculous: I have made things, with my own hands, out of scraps, that have paved my way through universities, taken me to new cities, brought me money and respect and authority and family, shown the people around me worlds beyond their experience. Answers lose their purpose after a while. I’d rather just do my work and ask questions later.
00:02:00,88 – A dream?
00:02:53,460 – Today’s third period PE has been changed
to health education for the female students.
00:03:52,220 – Hey, watch what you’re doing!
You could have cracked it, and then what? Huh?
00:04:25,550 – <i>Don’t tell me < /i>you<i> laid that egg?< /i>
00:12:25,550 – What if it’s postpartum depression?
00:14:17,950 – Betrayed by their egg-laying daughters.
00:17:54,400 – People eat eggs all the time.
00:19:29,733 – Parents bequeathing their hearts to
their children in urns, the eternal procession.
00:20:51,280 – My… egg.
I saw my great-grandmother in a dream a week ago. She was living in a commune with my great-aunt (accurate) and my shitty grandfather and step-grandmother (not accurate), packing a wardrobe full of lovely cocktail dresses for the nursing home. I was on the run for breaking into an Orthodox chapel, so I ran right past her into a pasture of sheep and forgot the whole thing. But as I was falling asleep last night I felt her so clearly, right behind my solar plexus. She was there, dark-haired and sepia-toned, listed as her husband’s housekeeper in the 1950 Census while he shacked up with her teenage niece, probably miserable but so solidly there that I could see how my family had survived long enough–through preteen pregnancies and psychiatric wards and cults and humiliation after humiliation–for me to become a dyke.
I could describe this painting, but quite frankly
If Harmony Hammond wanted
Eyes all over the hands that made it
She’d write an essay and be done with it. And she did—
Give us the essay and painting, and hands—
But somehow the world’s forgotten how to read.
Dear Harmony, I want to shout this painting
From the rooftops–
The cold cord cut, knot, cut again, knot again,
Hanging useless in its eloquence,
Bandaged/strapped down/cradled
/Renounced by voracious eyes,
An empty pocket painted over. I counted:
There’s nine knots total
And each one just breaks me more.
How do you do it?
How does the bandage snap so many times?
I spoke too clearly. Some guy in the audience just raised his hand
And asked for a helpful chart of sex acts
Corresponding to each of your brush strokes
And I’ve never respected you more. Pass me a bandage—
This painting is incomprehensible, and I have
A blindfold to tie.
The goal of my current studio practice is to reclaim traditionally feminine art forms from the racist and misogynist separation of fine art and craft, by reinterpreting ephemeral moments in popular culture through a queer feminist theoretical framework.
(I am making Star Trek fanart.)
I dreamt last night that I was part of a planetary survey party from a spaceship on a deep space expedition. We were exploring the foggy, craggy landscape of our destination world when we were taken prisoner by our doppelgängers (like in the movie Us). The facility they took us to was endless, full of underground concrete warehouses with medical equipment and thin wire headsets that resembled vintage dental equipment. The prisoners were test subjects in an incomprehensible scientific-industrial complex, subjected to medical torture–one was strapped into a chair and forced to trace their own pain spasms on a chart like a lie detector, but their pen was hooked up to an IV in their arm that drew their own blood as ink. If you resisted, if you so much as attempted to speak with other hostages, you’d have a limb amputated on the spot. An urgent, life-or-death plot was unfolding to communicate under the guards’ noses with cafeteria forks.
• Right to unreadability
• Right to privacy
• Right to grow up
• Right to abstraction
• Right to immaturity
• Right to fearlessness
• Right to unmarketability
• Right to materiality
• Right to defiance
• Right to refuse
As part of my research about contemporary science fiction’s utopian impulse to revisit the aesthetics of 1960’s B-movies, I am now performing a Wikipedia deep dive about Teletubbies, a cult classic children’s TV show of my generation. My show-stopping thesis: Teletubbies was the most groundbreaking piece of science fiction to come out of the 1990’s. The show was created because its producers at BBC were concerned about how the rapid technological progress of the 1990’s was affecting young children. Andrew Davenport, the writer, had grown up watching the moon landing in 1969 and, after noticing that the astronauts’ movements in their spacesuits were very toddler-like due to mobility constraints, recognized a way to bridge the gap between children and technology. His and television producer Anne Wood’s strategy was to ease children’s anxiety by reflecting their early developmental experiences with tech back to them. A “language” was developed for the show based on children’s emergent speech patterns, and the main characters watched human children on television screens in their stomachs to imply that the TV’s relationship to the audience was reciprocal. Their home was a spoof of the spaceship in Doctor Who (another cult-classic sci-fi that was airing reruns on BBC), but constructed in bright materials with cheerful, rounded architecture. The characters even kept a googly-eyed vacuum cleaner, that last bastion of everyday technological terror, as a pet to prove they could be “friendly.”
This was an act of empathy so earnest that Teletubbies became one of the most controversial shows in the history of children’s media. Critics and parents derided the show for everything from being annoying, to “being a bad influence,” to actively delaying children’s development. The production team had to build tents on-site to protect its crew from paparazzi. Developmental psychologists hated the show, and I can confirm that it was banned from my family’s home as my autistic toddler self was learning to speak. But I loved it, and so did friends my age; they’d all grown up on it too. It’s undeniable that rewatching the show as an adult was an uncomfortably surreal experience. It resurfaced a disturbing, long-forgotten sensory experience that the majority of adults have had, and the further removed you are from childhood the more uncanny it becomes. I’m inclined to think that’s what made it good art: it “comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.” Either way, debates over the show raged in major news outlets for months, only relenting when Princess Diana’s death hit the headlines.
I’m in my childhood bedroom and the lights are off, except for the warm glow from under my closet door. I open the door: the closet is shallow but long, shoved in the space between my wall, a window, and my par- ents’ bedroom. It stretches on for miles of contact paper flooring and scuffed walls, and I spend the whole night wandering down the hallway. The walls are hung with bright pink neon signs with letters that don’t spell out anything. There’s supposed to be a fourth wall at the other end, where the house ends and the window begins, but I never find it.
Physical investigation: power + living/once-living material + conductivity
The roles of the parts determined by relationality NOT by essence – any part can play any role in different systems
Triads (two materials plus power) defined by two transitive sets of relationships:
Triads defined by three sets of relationships:
Notes:
anya benninger 