Always Steal Never Borrow
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today i’m stalking someone who looks both like a grandmother and a person who could be my lover and who is triggering, triggering …
so this is about love and
i walked into this place, not knowing but expecting everything. and in the first room, there you were, a specter video projection, dressed like joseph beuys in renegade wear with your head buried in a pile of fat, just holding still. the church lady guard in the room making a sketch of something else. her grin is disconcerting juxtaposed with the image of you, now lowering your legs into the fat.
A throw of the device doesn’t abolish chance. I’m just trying to walk through the door here, enough
[somebody else, somewhere else asks: What should change?
What should stay the same?
What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do?
the brutal truth.
the relationship between original and originality, as well as accessing space for new thinking.
A wild throw of the dice.
Hate, violence, our hot desire for death.
Raising a lot more hell.]
here’s how I’d like to tell the story: I’m standing in a room, around me are some of the things you’re most (un)known for— precisely imprecise repeats of iconic works by privileged mostly white male artists, many created just before these men became canonized as “masters” of the 20th century.
what’s catching me by surprise in this showroom is the live go-go dancer in tiny silver shorts. Surrounded by repeats of warhol, johns and lichtenstein, my man is shaking his thing and his thing and his other thing, listening to headphones on a low blue platform that is bordered with small light bulbs in the middle of the room.
this is repeat as well, a gonzalez-torres moment. made from her recollection of the work and from the available materials, its details differ slightly from the ones i’d seen in photographs, smaller light bulbs. the dancer in this case wasn’t a muscle man with a buzz cut, but a thin tattooed twink, dancing in the silver lamé short shorts and with the yellow sony sports walkman that i know from the books. that particular walkman catches my eye because it is inscribed in my childhood memories of the 80s; it’s one the kids in the know had (not me)— the first status symbol of cool.
I wanted to hear what he was listening to, or ask, “Hey, what’s it like up there?” “How much are they paying you?” “Maybe we could talk when you step off that pedestal, what are you doing after this?”
Language is not jargon, but language is jargon—demanding and diminishing it to non-function with the powerful reversal of negative usage.
Always at stake is pushing the silent power of art to create a hovering force and energy that leaves the spectator rocking and reeling.
The work is done predominantly from memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors, and thus coming out in the same place.
That might be a bit abrupt. But still, you’re sending these signs that I can read and maybe those tourists taking your photo can’t. you’re on live display every saturday from 12 to 3, I’ll be back. I’m distracted by the other objects in the room. the lichtenstein hot dog in a bun painting, a repeat of this enduring symbol of the fast-food penis … and then, the big flat endless warhol flowers, oversized, the image pirated originally from a kodak advertisement, repeat repeat repeat.
and then there are these johns plaster and bronze casts of light bulbs, resting on top of little blocks that are like oversized soap bars. just lying there a little flaccid, a bit testicular, a little bit like the way a body with a round shape might lie on top of a body with a square shape. i find these little beasts sexy, and absurd. i’d never seen them that way before, some kind of echo/shadow being cast …
this might be an exhibition hall, but it occurs to me that she’s staged a takeover. reco(r)ding an exhibitionist/deeply queer disco/hot dog/decorative/light bulb/orgasm space. something is turning me on.
Reading Michael Jackson was My Lover by Victor M. Guttierez (self-published, 1997)—the super reality of truth as falsity. And always in between, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to prevent brain damage; using horizontal thinking.
remake reuse reassemble, recombine— that’s the way to go. the force of the work lies in the premise that thought is power.
ruptures and leaps, tensions and intensities, and strident repetitions that bring to full force the blatant exterior: the outside brutally dismissing the interior.
she doesn’t go to porn movie houses to jerk off, doesn’t wear her collar up … the work is loaded with guts and passion … those who came were moved to tears
prior assumptions (the icons, the art history lessons, the neutralizing figure illustrations) quietly accepted come unhinged. things that are recognizable: hot dog is a hot dog is a flower is a dance step is a pulse
strips down what happens when one object stands next to another. how to image-name the system, that one that gives some things surplus value while undermining others, that turns declarations into logos, that whitewashes our ability to see for ourselves. it is something primed for detonation.
now. it’s time to start, (re)new. i’m watching my seeing unravel. this is a moment
there never has to be something else. There is no end. The head doesn’t go dead after you understand it. On the contrary there are many places to go …
fraught with linkage and displacement; a tight play between screens that shoves
originality has its limitations and requires superseding origins
every kid with a lollipop knows … absolute clarity is a rigorous
closure.
FURTHER READING Sturtevant, “Sliding Parameters of Originality,” in Original, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1995. “Questionnaire: Sturtevant,” frieze, October 2004. “Sturtevant talks to Bruce Hainley,” Artforum, March 2003. “Bill Arning Interviews Sturtevant,” in Sturtevant, Munich: Oktagon, 1992. “Sturtevant as Sturtevant as Sturtevant is John Waters as John Waters as John Waters is,” in Sturtevant: The Brutal Truth, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2004. |