Getting To Know You Then http://www.janestown.net Thu, 09 Nov 2017 11:03:50 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.3 selections from the vernacular pic collection aka my orphans http://www.janestown.net/2014/09/selections-from-the-vernacular-pic-collection-or-my-orphans/ Mon, 15 Sep 2014 01:25:41 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=4040 I started collecting old snapshots after spending hours sifting through an immense warehouse of junk that we regulars affectionately called “Sid’s on Driggs”, a space now occupied by a yipster grocery store and luxury apartments. I learned when they were asked to pick up the remains of loved one’s estate (ie. the unwanted contents of an apartment or house), it typically meant everything. Sid chose to leave the boxes of family albums and generations of photos out for people to buy along with furniture, clothes, knick-knacks, linens, housewares, etc. I loved it. Loved the surprises and discoveries of so much ephemera.

The photos were instantly compelling. I’d spend hours obsessively going through them, getting very drawn into the narratives they suggested, selecting those I liked based on various criteria, subjective, aesthetic, social, etc. They were so cheap, I couldn’t help myself, and sometimes I wanted to preserve the integrity of what could be 3 generations of family snapshots, so I got a lot. Over the years I found other junk shops with photos, but some were priced as precious. Luckily I found another place with a similar penchant (more like a willingness, I’d suspect) for taking in entire estates, The Thing, which opened in my neighborhood right about the time Sid’s closed. At first, I began collecting old stationary and greeting cards from the later, until I realized they had flat files in the back stuffed with old pics. The Thing then became my haunt, and I’d sit in a corner of the dirty store on the floor, slavishly going through drawer after drawer, flipping through thousands of images. I got many gems from both places, photos dating back to the early 20th century, polaroids of every format, pics printed on scalloped paper or in stereo formats, taken on all kinds of cameras: the variety was endless and enthralling!

Obvious categories emerged – birthdays, vacations, holidays, pets and kids, etc. – but I learned things too like it was weirdly common for guys in the 1920s-1940s to form pyramids or other formal shapes for group portraits (mimicking sports, I guess?). And people love posing with their cars. I’ve got photos from the 1950s of an old pet cemetery, images of WWII soldiers (including Nazis), amateur porn, representations across class and race as well as subjects and formats.

Anyway, a while back an intern of mine scanned some of the pics from my collection, a mere fraction of what I have, and I just came across the file, so thought I’d share here. The resolution is low, but they’re still great to look at. Of course, “vernacular photography” has now become a mega market with serious collectors (including famous photographers and museums) such that I don’t even bother to look anymore. I have so many as it is, and really need to spend time archiving rather than adding to the collection. Last summer a dealer rather greedily offered to buy them off me when he realized what I had, and I visibly recoiled at the suggestion. I’ve always felt rather protective of these images, which I think of as my orphans. I’ve shared them with very few people, so this is a big deal. Remember these photographs represent real people’s lives, and represent a time when personal photos were just that, PERSONAL. Yes, they also represent a history of technology, shifts in cultural and social mores, and a relationship to photos that you couldn’t entirely control. There are many “mistakes” and unintentionally interesting images in my collection, for example, that in today’s digital world would’ve been deleted, gone. Anyway, ENJOY respectfully, and please don’t disseminate without permission of acknowledgement, thank you!

 

 

 

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vignettes of the nite XXVII: snow and random desktop pics http://www.janestown.net/2014/01/2775/ Sun, 05 Jan 2014 03:56:02 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=2775 Buzz buzz buzz! I’ve not had a second to land here in a few days because I’ve been busy! Hope everyone survived Hercules. I’ve enjoyed it immensely, as always! And dry snow is the best, perfect weather to sled, ski, snowboard, or just walk on. Blizzards are magical, and having grown up with them, including the Blizzard of 77, I know they can be biblical too. That one entailed below zero temperatures after being buried in snow so high we could slide right out of our second story window, everything shut down for weeks as we dug out.

I remember being told that morning at school we had to go home early. It was a very sunny day. I stayed with my friend Beth because my mother was working, and watched the clouds herd angrily. We played and played in the days that followed while the adults panicked. I have so many wonderful memories of playing in snow.

My family lived on a court with a giant power plant behind it such that it was wide open fields. So we had all the snow inside the court piled up into a hill that we sled on, played king of the hill, or my favorite, dug tunnels through. And in the back, the fields turned to ice made for a perfect skating rink, place to play ice hockey, though the ski-mobiles, which my mom found obnoxious (along with pools), cut up the ice more and more as they became popular.

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Its weird to think about that power plant now knowing its electromagnetic radiation may have contributed to my dad’s health/MS (multiple sclerosis). I picked wild strawberries out of those fields, grew pollywogs, and watched nests of baby rabbits thrive, and I’m mostly ok, lolz, but who knows.

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Anyway, glittering and transient like the snow, the new year has arrived, and rather than ignore my citizens, I thought I’d share the random photos on my desktop at the moment before I file them away or delete. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say. Consider them a visual stream-of-consciousness, a chance poem of the 21st century.

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vignettes of the nite XXVII: speaking the truth http://www.janestown.net/2013/12/2604/ Sun, 08 Dec 2013 04:22:17 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=2604 This is a very interesting interview with scientist, Carl Hart, on his recent book, High Price: A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society. Its a wonderful example of the autobiographical merging with the ethical. Here’s a couple quotes:

“There are whole generations of black men wiped out because their records are blemished. If we start to deal with some of the consequences of our drug policy without legalization, I’m all ears. But if you avoid historical issues and you say, ‘We’re worried about creating the next big drug industry,’ you’re missing the point. What do you think has happened to some of these people? Their lives are ruined.”

“I cannot say that drugs got any of my friends. It wasn’t about drugs; it was about petty crime. They got caught up in the system. And the system did more harm than drugs. Once you’re in the system, the likelihood of getting out is very low.”

And speaking of institutional racism, and the need to call it out, the death of Nelson Mandela saddened me this week (my activism began in response to apartheid). He was and is a real hero to me. And just as with Lou Reed, I refuse to read about “the backlash”, manufactured media frenzy. Its vile.

(Speaking of which, while it can’t be undone, I wish his grandkids hadn’t done that reality TV show, Being Mandela, it almost tarnished his name. I get that a lot can happen in two generations – hello! and everyone wants to get paid, but c’mon). I do recommend this Frontline feature on his life, for a primer on the broad sweep of Mandela’s life, from a man born to a tribal chief to a political prisoner who spent 30 years in jail, and all he did before, during, and after. He is the Martin Luther King of South Africa no matter what mud the muckrackers sling. The doc also reminds you of those who also gave their life to the fight, and who, like Walter Sisulu, Mandela’s mentor, who was essential to his success, and forever in its shadow.

ANYWAY, coming across this accidentally tonight reminded me that are so many ways to make a difference, and speaking the truth whether its popular or not is first and foremost. ONWARD BOUND CITIZENS OF JANESTOWN!

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vignettes of the nite XVII: happy halloween from balmy-misty nyc http://www.janestown.net/2013/10/vignettes-of-the-nite-xvii-happy-halloween-from-balmy-misty-nyc/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 03:49:35 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=2290 Its time for Halloween pie and a scary movie, a new tradition I made up at Trader Joe’s tonite:) Shot these pics on my way to and from, a little after-parade action. I SO ENJOYED seeing the little ones on the avenue earlier today though only got one shot (the last). Always a lot of sparkling princesses! A bit gaggy, I suppose, from a feminist POV, but when you meet a wee sparkly princess in person, as I did tonite (the first one), you get it! As you can see she just radiates her “specialness”. The magic in a costume lies in inhabiting who/what you dress as, not how smart the concept is. At least for kids, spidery dreams and haunted kisses…

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vignettes of the night VII: oops http://www.janestown.net/2013/10/vignettes-of-the-night-vii-oops/ Wed, 16 Oct 2013 06:23:42 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=2016 Almost forgot.

Getting out of the train tonite, I found myself thinking about my 20 year anniversary, of how impossible it would seem to live anywhere else. Outside NYC I mean, because I’d move back to Manhattan, should it be an option (not likely, waay too poor). But Brooklyn really is a lot more interesting overall (filmmakers, musicians, artists, everyone whose anyone in the up-and-coming way is producing in this borough).

Greenpoint has changed so much since I’ve been here these last 14 years. Which is what I specifically was thinking as I saw a new yippie shoe store go up, and a Ricky’s pop-up for Halloween. And I thought Starbucks and then Seven Eleven had truly sealed its fate. HA, who knows. As the waterfront gets developed and more homeless shelters get built to shuffle all the newly vulnerable homeless that it will create (there’s already a 200-bed facility that went up a year ago, and one of the worst SROs in NYC history a few blocks away, which has been here for decades). But I don’t wanna go off on the horrors of gentrification, here’s a few BK pics for you of the hood instead!
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kodak moments that never were… http://www.janestown.net/2013/07/memories-a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words/ Thu, 25 Jul 2013 03:39:27 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=1829 Memories or childhood stories of myself I wish there was a photo for:

1 – One of my first memories is going to a car lot with my mom to pick up her first car – a brand Volkswagon beetle (or bug as we called it). In red! This car had 20 years on the road before the body gave out and my brother put the engine into another model, which I later inherited as my first car, and loved! He’d lined it in shag carpeting, including the ceiling, and it was 2 gears – how weird is that to think of? I had fun with that car until I drove it into a ditch speeding down a road in the wee hours of the morning (yes, after a nite of drinking) that had iced over suddenly. I remember this well because I was about 17, new-ish to driving. And as bad as trashing the car was (I literally rolled over in it), I also happened to be wearing my mother’s silk Bally wedding shoes, which she’d told me never to wear. I remember waking my Dad up (as she was visiting family in germany, hence my thinking I could get away with the shoes), and he was relatively nice/calm. The second time I trashed a car, not so nice (and that one also involved ice and wasn’t my fault). I still feel guilty about those shoes. Champagne silk pumps with a small heel. I had to trek through muddy lawns to get to houses that stood far from the street in order to get help, so there was nothing I could do. Anyway, not a single pic of either exists, not even the VW bugs.

2 – In elementary school, apparently some teacher took a bunch of us little girls to a hair salon (why, no clue) where I insisted, my mom says, that I wanted a hairdo styled like Dolly Parton. And I came home with my thick brown locks in some extravagantly teased, rolled concoction of hairspray that was supposedly hilarious. I don’t remember this day (this is not unusual, I have a shitty memory), but I would’ve loved to see what I looked liked, grateful as I am for the story because it confirms the origins of my long-standing love for big, sculpted, wigs/hair. Oh well. Here’s one of my favorite portraits of Dolly instead, taken around the same time by the great Henry Horenstein (c. 1970s).

3 – I entered a drugstore competition where you had to color in a pic of Santa Claus. Apparently, I gave him a purple hair, and turned his coat and boots into a mini-skirt with go-go boots. It won first prize (some kind of chocolate bar I didn’t like, I’m told – again no recollection). The drawing nor any pic of it exists, sad to say (though I do remember seeing a drawing I did of myself as a nurse for some “what do you wanna be when you grow up?” assignment from around the same time so my mother did save a few, at least for a while. After my grandmother died and she had to go overseas and sort out her estate, she became OCD minimalist). Anyway, in lieu of any visual equivalent, here’s an anonymous polaroid I found online that’s pretty great!

ok, well I will update this over time….in meantime, please share your own “Kodak moments” that never were, and any visual subsititutions! And for some vintage fun, here’s some great old camera commercials!

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the fire gods of glitter: hunter reynolds on the art of healing http://www.janestown.net/2012/05/the-fire-gods-of-glitter-hunter-reynolds-on-the-art-of-healing/ Sun, 27 May 2012 22:20:34 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=1072 (also published in Huffpost)

The desire to inspire others to keep on going regardless of the suffering and hardships encountered in life is a noble pursuit in art, and a tall order at that. But the desire to inspire others to find in their suffering and hardship the makings of beauty and healing — well, that’s magic in my book. In the realm of contemporary art, there tends to be a divide between the two as the political and spiritual rarely align in a single practice. Franklin Sirmans did a great job in 2008 highlighting some of these rarities in his group exhibition at PS 1/MoMA “NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith”. Focused on the use of ritual “as a means to recover ‘lost’ spirituality and to reexamine and reinterpret aspects of cultural heritage”, it included Tania Bruguera, James Lee Byars, Jimmie Durham, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Michael Joo, and others. Earlier that same year, AA Bronson collaborated with a group of young gay male artists – Item Idem, Michael Dudek and Scott Treleaven, among them – in “School for Young Shamans” at John Connelly Presents, an exciting installation-cum-experiment that emphasized a return to the idea of artist as healer via the sixties paradigm of the “free school”.

Still, sometimes it takes a sustained, intimate examination of one artist’s journey through a lifetime of trials and tribulations to really appreciate and understand the power of ritualized healing. A person who has – without didactics or heritage – instinctively sought to reinvent himself through the self-revelation that pain is transformation. An artist like Hunter Reynolds, whose friends regularly refer to him as the proverbial cat with nine lives because he has endured so much and achieved even more. So on the occasion of his recent solo exhibition, Butur, at PPOW Gallery, I sat down with Reynolds to talk about the magical nature of an art practice that in the aftermath of two AIDs-related strokes, and three summers spent at a spiritual retreat for gay men, led the artist to create such an inspiring, beautiful body of new work.

JH: Your Rorschach paintings were created after a stroke-related paralysis forced you to learn to use your left (non-dominant) hand, and are also nostalgic in origin, harkening back the diagnostic tests you underwent as a learning disabled child, right?

The Star of Markab Glitter Mask, 2011, ash, glitter, acrylic, polymer on arches archival cold press, 20 x 15 inches, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

HR: Yes, in 2003 after 3 years of what I thought was a midlife crisis, which started for me at the age of 40, I began a process of recovery. Recovery from 911, recovery from my addiction to crystal meth, recovery from my self and the loss of hope I felt about my sudden inability to process my own pain. The pain in life that we often try to cover up or avoid is the kind I have always been good at recovering from in order to reinvent my self. It has been my modus operandi. I have always believed that no matter how difficult life is, it is a beautiful thing to be alive and there is something better on the other side of that pain. Making art has been the tool I use to process and deal with my pain as well as transform it.

Shaman Mugak Totem Collage, 2009, acrylic and thread on paper, 44 x 18 inches, Courtesy PPOW Gallery

This is a skill, a discipline I learned very young, in fact. My grandmother taught me to paint in oils at the age of 4 years old. This saved my life in many ways. I was good at it, and it gave me a language to communicate and structure the chaos and abuse I was experiencing on a daily basis.

Taking a paint box out into nature, to the forts I built, became a means not only to escape my painful reality, but to create a new and better one. This practice became my obsession and also helped me process a world that was literally a blur for me as it wasn’t until the age of 8 that someone figured out I needed glasses. Couple that with a daily life of chaos, and the fact that I was severely learning disabled (unable to functionally read or write), and you can imagine how strange it was just navigating survival.

The Star of Scheat Glitter Mask, 2011, ash, glitter, acrylic, polymer on arches archival cold press, 20 x 15 inches, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

In school I acted stupid and sat in an unresponsive state of silence most of the time. I was subjected to tests and tutors and remedial classes that I usually failed at, and was sent to a few psychiatrists for evaluation because people thought I was a “retard”. This really worked for me. In the end everyone got so frustrated they just left me alone.

Ink blot tests were one of tools used by therapists to evaluate me. I was able to respond to them verbally and describe what I thought I saw. I remember that it was fun, like looking at the sky and seeing animals and faces in the clouds.

The doctor who I was sent to – because no one had heard me speak for a few months -told my parents that I was not stupid, or unable to communicate, but just needed a lot of support and special attention. Well that fell on dysfunctional deaf ears.

JH: So how would you connect this return to a crucial visual and psychological moment in your past – symbolized by the Rorschach series – to the need to start over physically?

Well, like I said I was unable to see properly for years and had learned to compensate for this disability through silence and painting. It was my third grade teacher who changed all that. She had written something on the board and called on me to answer a question. It was my first week in a new school and I was sitting at the back of the room. She asked me several times and began to yell at me, “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME NOW!” I began to cry. Then I said it for the first time in my life, “I cant see the board” . She asked me to look in her eyes and I could not even see her face. She was just a big blob. She held up her hand and asked me how many fingers she was holding up. I said I could not see her hand. At that moment she walked me to the clinic and I had glasses 10 days later.

Suddenly I was able to process all this information and my learning curve sped up. This event was both visually and psychologically a seminal moment in my childhood. So after the strokes I went through a process of looking backward, and studying my notebooks and sketchbooks to see how I might reinvent my creative process with my left hand. Drawing and sketching and working in notebooks has been a continual part of my practice over the last 30 years, even though many people perceive me as a conceptual performance and photo based artist. The Rorschach test ink blots were something I found repeatedly scattered throughout my sketchbooks, sod when in 2008 I had the opportunity to turn a barn in Westchester into a studio, the ink blots seemed the perfect way to get back to mark-making and image making. I just simply started throwing paint on paper and folding it in half though everything – from cutting and tearing to sewing them – was a great challenge. I had to figure out one-handed techniques for every aspect of the process, which was both time-consuming and often very frustrating. It took me three years to finish the series.

JH: And what about the use of the glitter?

HR: Glitter! what can I say about it other than it sparkles, and that makes me happy.

JH: Yes, and perhaps the glitter represents the kind of optimism Roger Denson referred to when discussing the sewn newspaper grids that comprised your 2011 series, Survival AIDS, shown at Participant Inc. In many of them electric colored mummies and lipstick kisses float above a blood-splattered graveyard of words, suggesting a kind of transcendence. As Roger put it: “riddled as the work is with the signage and iconography of death and disease, Reynolds keeps the message clear of becoming an elegy of surrender to the forces that could bury our hopes.” One could relate these works, and their methodical/cathartic impulse to the new work – the Rorschach paintings, and fire totems alike – via this tone of hope and optimism, don’t you think?

Congressional Record (page 19), 2011, c-prints and thread, 60 x 48 inches, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

HR: , Interestingly enough Survival AIDS and the fire totems in my current exhibition were created side by side during the same time period. Both came out of an energetic healing process conducted over three summers at the Easton Mountain Retreat Center in upstate NY, a spiritual retreat for gay men, where I created fire rituals that became the literal basis for these sculptures. So although these two bodies of work look very different, they both reflect aspects of my healing process, and a desire to use art a as life-long healing process that will inspire others to see that no matter how difficult and painful life can be, it is worth living and there is is hope. Everyone must find hope in something. I find it in art.

JH: That’s what makes your work so incredibly intimate, I think. It must have been very intense going through all those newspaper headlines and stories chronicling a very difficult period in gay history, and your own personal life. What led you to create that work?

Gay is Not OK, 2011, c-prints and thread, 60 x 48 inches, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

HR: Between 2006 and 2009 I was looking back at my creative practice over the last 30 years, and I was really looking at everything. One of things I was struggling with was photography. I’ve been taking pictures since I was 18 years old, thousands of them, mostly 4 x 6 inch prints that document my life. In the past, I thought of this practice in diaristic terms, using the photos in installations where I’d put them on tables, stack them in shoe boxes, or arrange in family photo albums – the way you would find them in your grandmother’s trunk.

“Can We Talk”, 1992, family table/performance site, Hunter College, 2008

I’d already begun to sew them together into tapestries – what I call Photo Weavings – by the early 1990s. Some were metaphorical portraits of people who died of AIDS, others were of nature and light documenting my body in place and time.

After my strokes, and the loss of the use of my right hand, I realized cameras were made for right-handed people. Because my camera was just too big and bulky, I decided to use Photoshop to create an installation called the Disaster Series that encompassed my experience of 9/11, Hurricane Wilma (which destroyed my house in Florida), and surviving AIDS. I proposed an installation for Momenta Art in Brooklyn titled “Hurricane Hunter Hurricane Wilma” that explored this. I found this box with tons of newspaper clippings related to AIDS, and the LGBT community’s efforts to end it, which I’d incorporated into my work of the early 1990s, and had been collecting since the late 1980s. I was astounded at how many there were. I spent a year and a half scanning thousands of articles and revisiting all these newspaper headlines, reliving this history with the profound realization that I was still alive to read them 20 years later. The resulting installation, Survival AIDS, was the most difficult conceptual project – other than the Memorial Dress – that I’ve ever made. It took me two years to create the photographs in Photoshop, about 4000 of them, a very rigorous activity. It was not only about reinventing a physical way of working but also about returning to a history of conceptual activism and chronicling a crucial time in gay history. It became very emotional for a while as I was reading many of the articles and obituaries etc. for the first time. Eventually, I had to adopt a kind of clinical detachment to get the project done.

Fear On Their Faces (page 7), 2011, c-prints and thread, 60 x 48 inches, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

JH: There seems to be a similar reciprocity between the mummification performances, with their simultaneous sense of endurance and transcendence, and the Memorial Dress/Patina Du Prey works (1993-2007), which also function as public ritual. The latter reference traditions of the sacred andogyne, specifically the berdache (Native American) myth of the two-spirit being (usually a male who identifies as female), and interestingly have been included in your current exhibition – an entire room devoted to them! – to contextualize the current work. Can you talk more about the significance of Patina du Prey?

HR: The birth of my alter ego, Patina du Prey, in 1989 was a project that stemmed from the negative and homophobic environment of my childhood. My mother was a 1950s beauty queen who’d saved her crinoline bell-jar shaped dresses. I was always fascinated watching her put on make up and get dressed. Also, my grandmother and I would make clothing for her dolls and my grandfather painted portraits of the Southern Bells at Cypress Gardens. So it seemed natural that I would want to put on her dresses. When my mother was at work, and I was home alone, I tried them on. I would spin around and let the crinoline blow in the wind and it felt so freeing and natural. It occurred to me at the age of 9 to do this in front of my friends who were mostly girls. So I did, we had a blast, and my first drag experience was a positive one. But when the girls went home and told their parents, the latter called mine who then punished me by banning me from playing with them. This was very traumatic and I never put on a dress again.

Until 1989 when I decided to confront the negative effects of this early experience by simply documenting the removal of my beard and applying make-up. At the time, I was a member of ACT UP, and found out that I’d been HIV positive since 1984. I also co-founded Art Positive, a group combating homophobia and AIDS phobia in the art world. My installations began reflecting these activist and political experiences, which I tried to bring into galleries and institutions.


Patina du Prey Self-Portrait, 2000/Patina du Prey Drag Pose Series, 1990, Photo Michael Wakefield, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

So Patina du Prey was born as a vehicle of healing for my own drag-phobia! And for two years I experimented with taking drag out of its kitschy context and making public appearances in the streets of NYC, and at art openings. I found out that it confronted people on a variety of levels. Sitting on the subway, or simply having coffee at McDonald’s became a political action. What surprised me the most was the hostile and aggressive reaction I received from the art world. I actually had people push me.

This all culminated in my first one-person exhibition in NYC called DRAG at Simon Watson in 1990. I exhibited a selection of the Drag Pose photographs, and created two performance sites in the space, The Vanity and The Cage. Every day I sat in the gallery at the Vanity in front of the Queen Mirror getting ready, putting make-up on, and talking with people. Then I would get into The Cage, which was suspended, and dance over the heads of visitors.

It was while performing in this cage for 5 hours a day for four weeks that I studied the psychological and emotional reactions viewers had to this image of a man in a dress. People could not look at me and would often just ignore me completely. Looking at me was confrontational. I realized that if I veiled my face then they could stop and really look at me. So I got several yard of tulle and and used it as a tool to allow viewers access to my image and their feelings around transgender and drag.


Patina du Prey Drag Pose Series, 1990, The Drag Cage Performance, Simon Watson Gallery NY, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

This performance changed my own perception about what I wanted to communicate with this project. I realized that I didn’t want to be a traditional drag queen nor did I want to co-opt the female body. I wanted to explore feminine and masculine codes of dress and what most focused these intentions was a book written by cultural anthropologist, Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Serena heard about my exhibition and came and talked to me while in the cage about gender identity, and her experiences of living with the Hijras, the name for third-gendered people in India. She sent me her book, and it changed the direction of my Patina du Prey project for the next decade.

I realized I needed to create a container, a vessel for for my body to function as metaphor for healing, using my 3rd gender identity, Patina du Prey. The form this took was a life-size music box with me standing as the rotating doll. The dress would be designed for my male body. It would not have breasts but would have the classic female dress codes.

I accomplished this in 1992 with the Banquet dress, which was printed with hair and blood, and made in collaboration with Chrysanne Statacos for our project, The Banquet. At this event, I rotated in the dress for 6 hours during a performance of feminist readings by various guests gathered around a meal being served off a live male nude.

So over the next 7 years I made 7 more of these dresses as sculptural performance works including: The Patina du Prey Memorial Dress, 1993, printed with 25,000 names of people who have died of AIDS; The Ascending Dress The Love Dress, 1994, inscribed with my hand-written diary texts and love stories; two different Dervish street performance dresses for the Goddess Within Project, with Maxine Heneryson, 1993-95; and finally the Mourning Dress,1997, featured in Butur.


Patina Du Prey’s Memorial Dress, 1993-2007, printed with 25,000 names of people who have died of AIDS, Photo by Maxine Henryson, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

The knowledge that my body through art became a energetic sacred site of healing was first experienced in my 1993 performance of the Memorial Dress at the ICA in Boston. I performed the turning dervish dance for almost 5 hours in front of a crowd of about 2000 people. During this trance, others also had very cathartic emotional reactions, weeping, convulsing and collapsing. Usually this happened because they were just coming to an art performance at which they may have found the name of a loved one inscribed on a dress being worn by a transgender person absorbing their pain while they experienced it.

When I was 30 I realized I wanted to use my ability to transform my own pain and the pain of others through my art also because of the words of a dear friend on his death bed. Ray Navarro told me that I should have no fear of dying of AIDS and not let it control my life, and to express this fearlessness in my work. So that is what I did.


Butur Installation View, Patina du Prey’s Mourning Dress, 1997, photographs from I DEA The Goddess Within Project, by Maxine Henryson, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

The Memorial Dress was performed and exists as a sacred site of healing in which I stand and turn as a transgender shaman. For many years I would never use that word, “shaman”. It has so many connotations and can be misused and easily misunderstood. Although I knew that was exactly what I was.

Unlike the Memorial Dress where acts of healing took place because of and within the context of the work itself, My exhibition, Butur, reflects an act of healing for my self. Living as a long term survivor of HIV and AIDS, overcoming strokes, shedding my masks and replacing them with Glitter masks that reflect my happiness, the Rorschach’s reflect my struggle back to beauty while the fire totems exist to absorb my pain as reflections of healing, and a life transformed.


Shiva Lingam, Fire Altar, Easton Mountain, 2010, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

JH: Can you tell me more about the process of the fire totems? How did they get made, and what was their impetus?

HR: The Fire Totems are the result of fire rituals that I conduct at Easton Mountain. Since the early 90’s when I was living in Berlin, I’ve been studying energetic spiritual healing with contemporary gay shamans. The spiritual journey I have taken for the last 20 years has included the study of Sufi Whirling Dervish dancing with Dieter Jarzombek, who has also worked extensively with Annie Sprinkle. With him I learned actual ritual techniques of healing, which included meditation, fire rituals, and vision quests in sweat lodges. So I was able to experiment and use these techniques in my performances in the Memorial Dress and The Goddess Within. These healing experiences happened within a structure I created to allow strangers and I to intuitively interact and experience some sort of healing together.


The Transformation of Butur, 2011-12, Easton Mountain Retreat Center NY, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

Creating ritual around and within my art has been a way of working that has taken many forms and intentions. I had not really worked with fire before I went to Easton Mountain in 2006. There I met Joe Monkman a contemporary gay shaman working with the Peruvian tradition of fire ceremony as a transformative process. After taking several workshops with Joe I wanted to explore what I had learned and experienced on my own. So in 2009 I took 3 months out of my city life and got a small cabin in the woods at Easton Mountain and set up an out door studio in the woods at a scarred fire pit. I began making private rituals and fires every day. I saw that I was interested in creating the fire altar, the wood that was to be burned as an art object. I would elaborately decorate with paint, glitter, fabric and other special things. Sometimes I spent days making the altar that was to be burned. Making this beautiful precious thing that you are going to destroy as an offering to fire gods for healing was a powerful experience.


Mandala, 2012, Installation View/Butur, PPOW Gallery, Courtesy of PPOW Gallery

In the summer of 2010 I began to perform ritual fires for community gatherings at Easton Mountain. There was a different fire each week and I would create elaborate fire altars with different intentions and themes related to various retreats.

So it was that summer when I was making totems by stacking chunks of wood to create the centerpiece of the altar structure that I discovered that while most of them would burn away (sometimes over the course of days), some of them would remain intact in the end as a charred object. I began to see this as an artifact of the ritual fire embedded with all the spiritual intention of the fire. I saw them as sculptures.


Butur, Installation View, 2012, PPOW Gallery, Courtesy PPOW Gallery

Butur the fire totem sculpture in my Exhibition at PPOW was created as result of these ritual experiences. It’s a four part process that takes several months to complete. The building of the fire altar, the ritual burning, the reconstruction of charred remains as an altar, and finishing the final object, which in the case of Butur required carving the wood with a grinder, and then sealing it with a lot of polyurethane and glitter.

The process of my fire rituals will be published in my forthcoming book, Burning a Path to Healing, and in the video, Butur.

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you’ve come a long way, baby! a chat with marilyn minter http://www.janestown.net/2011/04/youve-come-a-long-way-baby-or-my-time-out-ny-chat-with-marilyn-minter/ Mon, 11 Apr 2011 05:33:12 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=841 Here’s my Time Out New York interview with artist Marilyn Minter — meeting her, visiting her studio, and talking about her work restored my faith in painting (no small feat)! Enjoy!

Marilyn Minter, Porn Grid, 1989

From her 1969 series of black-and-white photographs showing her own drug-addled mother lying about the house in negligees and curlers, to her recent Times Square billboards of dirt-encrusted feet in fancy high heels, Marilyn Minter has evoked the beauty of imperfection, becoming, in the process, an art-world rock star. But success was a long time coming. In the late 1980s she created a group of paintings based on hard-core pornographic photos, including money shots. Titled “Porn Grids,” these works were slammed as sexist by politically-correct critics , who assumed they spoke for all women. More than two decades on, Minter’s once-soiled reputation has been rehabilitated, and her sumptuous large-scale canvases—of female mouths in lurid close-up, slathered in lipstick, dripping sweat and spitting up pearls—have propelled her to well-deserved fame. On the occasion of a show at Soho’s Team Gallery, featuring those controversial works from the ’80s, Minter looks back at the period and shares her feelings about it.

What was the genesis of the “Porn Grid” series?
The idea came to me after seeing a Mike Kelley show in 1988 at Metro Pictures, which I thought was brilliant. He’d made stuffed animal sculptures, felt banners and decoupaged furniture with magazine cutouts of eyes and lips. And I thought if a woman artist had made this work, it would’ve been dismissed as sentimentality, and not given much attention. It got me wondering, What subject had women artists never touched? And what came to me was porn, but it couldn’t be soft-core—that had been done. It had to be hard-core, complete with money shots. Would the fact that a woman had painted them change the meaning of such images? I was asking questions I didn’t have answers for, and that was my undoing in those politically correct times.

I can’t help thinking that if a male artist like Richard Prince had made similar images back then, they would have cemented his reputation. Why do you think the reception you got was so different? Was it sexism?
People simply weren’t used to prosex feminists or women owning sexual imagery, so the press was pretty bad. And it was a blanket rejection by male and female critics alike. I’d actually thought that those on the left would have been my ally, regardless of gender. I mean, nobody has politically correct fantasies, right? Anyway, I was inconsolable at the time, and decided that if they didn’t like my work I was going to make images that were even nastier—an immature reaction on my part, I guess, because I believe artists should try to communicate, not chase people out of the room.

What were some of the criticisms that hurt the most?
Being on the losing end of a comparison with Cindy Sherman, who is a hero of mine. That was probably the worst. Also, if you work with sexual imagery and it’s rejected, it just feels like an endless wave of shame.

Why is pornography so taboo for female artists?
There’s just this glass ceiling when it comes to women working with sexual imagery. Look at Laurel Nakadate, a really great, interesting artist. She’s making a picture of a reality that exists, and it’s never been documented by anyone, male or female. Hers is a fresh vision, and her critics dismiss it as exploitation!

I think objectification occurs whether the body is idealized or denigrated. What makes the “Porn Grid” series so relevant today is the way it rides the line between the two, refusing to adhere to an either/or position.
Telling people what to think is not interesting to me. Art is supposed to transcend the binary terms of language.

Speaking of binaries, the Team Gallery show also includes another ’80s series of yours, “Big Girls/Little Girls,” which depicts young girls in the 1950s looking into fun-house mirrors. Those were actually well received as a commentary on the cultural prescriptions of beauty. Was that what you were aiming for?
Maybe. Intentions aren’t something I think about; it’s all subliminal for me. I did get an article in Arts Magazine about that work, but it was unreadable. I had no idea what the writer was saying, and I must have read it ten times!

Marilyn Minter, “Paintings from the ’80s” is on view at Team Gallery, through Apr 30.

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ruminations on sexiness and aging with the inimitable genesis breyer p-orridge http://www.janestown.net/2011/01/ruminations-on-sexiness-and-aging-with-the-inimitable-genesis-breyer-p-orridge/ http://www.janestown.net/2011/01/ruminations-on-sexiness-and-aging-with-the-inimitable-genesis-breyer-p-orridge/#comments Wed, 05 Jan 2011 05:17:02 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=435

One of my silliest memories of hanging with Genny was an evening back at The Gates Institute where we’d taken Biggie for a walk in his new giant “pram” (British for stroller). The latter had been purchased in anticipation of Genny’s upcoming move to a condo in the LES, inhabited largely by Hasidic Jews, that didn’t allow dogs. It was intended to be a disguise vehicle for getting the little Jack Russell mutt in and out of the building and also to enable Biggie, who’d grown frail with age, to get outside more without the pain of walking. There we were strolling along Myrtle Avenue on our way to a Dominican diner, Biggie sitting upright in the pram looking to and fro through its thick plastic pane, pleased as punch in his extravagant carriage. And more or less invisible to the passing naked eye lest one peer hard enough at the oddly contoured baby inside with his pointed noise and tall perky ears. Could there be a better way to travel? Periodically, a bold or curious child would try to look inside, and you could see their surprise… is that a dog?! Indeed so.  Genny’s canine “son” we’d explain. Our giggles and theirs sum up what I love best about Gen:  h/er generosity and patience with those that might stare (as many often do), h/er ability to disarm ignorance with humor and grace (though never resorting to condescension), and above all else h/er noble sense of daring.

Fate is many things but rarely indifferent, and this is how I must describe my friendship with Genesis, which grew in the aftermath of h/er greatest tragedy; the untimely passing of h/er beloved wife and “Other Half”, Lady Jaye. I’d been curating an exhibition called “Keeping Up with the Joneses” that was to include their work, and the utter shock of Jaye’s passing broke my heart.  That such a rare and beautiful love as they shared could so mercilessly be derailed in what was obviously its prime was, and remains, truly heartbreaking stuff. Still, as I grew to understand, the special bond they shared was very much alive. Transcending the physical limits of bodily form, after all, was essential to their project of pandrogeny as was the desire to create a third sex and unified being. This is why Genesis still often speaks today in the pronoun of “we”.  Like Gilbert & George who once informed me they weren’t a collaboration, but rather “an artist” the concept of identity for Genny extends beyond both gender — and ultimately, the grave. H/er ruminations here on sexiness and aging then necessarily revolve around and entwine h/er relationship with Jaye, revealing in the process this pandrogenous notion of transcendent integration. As s/he signs all her correspondence, “’S/HE IS (STILL) HER/E’ New TOPI Proverb. DEDICATED TO THEE MEMORY OF MY GUARDIAN ANGEL, LADY JAYE BREYER P-ORRIDGE 1969-2007,” so too I dedicate this article to the spirit of Lady Jaye.

JH: I think that people feel – and are! – sexier as they grow older (providing they are sexual people to begin with), but how to manage the ironic fact that our bodies grow less sexy with age. Or is this already the wrong assumption? I tend to think that its instinctual to associate decay – i.e.. wrinkles/sagging flesh – with mortality yet know that feeling sexy can make you sexy, right?…or is this wishful thinking?

Men, of course, have traditionally dealt with this mortality factor by exercising their social prerogative to fuck younger women/bodies – an advantage extending from greater economic and political power and the fact that they can procreate longer…Women, gaining ground in this area, are doing the same now (I have), even if their prowess is still pejoratively limited by terms like “cougar” and “MILF” (another topic for another day). I must admit that I’ve always felt resistant to dating older men as it seemed so easy and without challenge. The older I get, of course, the more I feel I should adjust this attitude. Yet like sex with beautiful people, which I’ve also had the luxury(?) of, sex with younger men – beyond the initial conquest – often holds little satisfaction, as sexiness, in the end, is more important and often independent of looks and age…For me, anyway, sexiness is very much rooted insomeone’s sense of themselves as an embodied creature, though I’d be lying if I said my initial interest wasn’t always governed by a sense of chemical and physical attraction….I have always generally liked conventionally good-looking men as well, a somewhat embarrassing fact – for its uninspired superficiality. Though I’ve fallen in love with men I didn’t find particularly handsome at first, most have been sexy in their own way.

Here’s the question I ponder at the moment: Does sexiness assume a physical dimension for most? And/or is power the ultimate aphrodisiac? Sometimes I believe it is just as mysterious and impossible to quantify as any other “taste”, but if power is the current – the energy force – that drives all human relations (as I believe it is), can one assume that powerful people possess and access sexiness more readily than those with less power? If so, is this the result of animal instincts? Or am I just conditioned by the exploitive hierarchies of capitalism to think this way?

GBP: When you first threw this subject at me we were not exactly daunted, but, surprisingly swiftly, (as our thought streams played around with those two seemingly innocuous words,) found that each bout of contemplation appeared to actually conceal clarity from my inward search. This was a process of layering, not unlike putting on “our face” with cosmetics. Our inner gaze was being distorted, even tricked.

This distortion should not have come as such a surprise or revelation. After all, our invitation to probe a little deeper into this enquiry was, at least in part, because of our chosen path as one half of the artist “BREYER P-ORRIDGE” otherwise known as the “PANDROGYNE” and, through that investigation, our gestural use of the hermaphroditic body as a transformative tool and a symbol for the eradication of gender altogether!

At the core of our Pandrogeny project are some threads of thought that entwine to create an integrated, hopefully new, form of symbolic “being” through which to achieve that eternally sought after state that we call “unconditional love” or “soul mate” or “my other half” as Lady Jaye preferred. We felt ourselves driven to pursue total mutual integration. So consumed by our discovery of what Lady Jaye dubbed “Big Love” were we that our deepest desire was to, in a sense, quite literally be totally absorbed by each other (if a means ever became possible and accessible to us). We were driven by a boundless passionate energy to eventually achieve absolute union by whatever means became available to us.

Now, please, don’t mentally imagine/visualize this concept as annihilation by one of the other; nor as one single cell that splits to form two separate cells of a whole, like identical twins. No…we picture two single cells that meet and at that precise point on the cell wall at that infinitesimal nanosecond they touch there is a blinding flash and those two previously single cells have become one much larger (not necessarily double-sized) autonomous single cell. Breyer P-Orridge call this process of the transfer of positive passionate energy from one human being to another  “COSMOSIS.” And of course the bright new shiny penny of a single cell created by this recombinant event a Pandrogyne.


Nevertheless, as artists, Breyer P-Orridge believe we must seek an eventual resolution of our enquiries through and with our art practice. Our puzzling over questions like: Why we are here? Is there a God? What happens after our body dies? Why don’t men get menstrual cramps? (Well a chosen few DO with fastidious practice) and so on. And, as artists, we turn to creation as an expression, notation, and vision of our internal dialogs. If we are fortunate artists we also get to “SHOW”, to “EXHIBIT” the evidence and detritus. Lately, our own complicated after-modernism works have been injected into that mysterious life blood of our species…CULTURE, thereby generating an external dialog, what we see as a conscious viral invasion of a host body by artists, or “CULTURAL ENGINEERING”.

Who have been our most mischievous secret agents for change? Those visionary creators who have been covertly honing their skills and talents for centuries under the very noses of their natural born and, probably, sworn antagonists who we shall dub the Aristocrats of Inertia. As artists we still swim in the same cultural stream of miasmic blood as everyone else, distilling and purifying as much as possible before apathy, greed and layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy and fear censor us. We exist within an inherited system, a status quo we do not choose. One that is constructed to simplify and homogenize moral standards and traditions innately bound to the maintenance of a self-serving hierarchy. This out of control edifice IS control. A monstrous, useless self-serving monolith fueled by hypocrisy, bigotry and hate always with a threat of intimidation and censorship close by. William S. Burroughs once said to me “When you want to know what’s really going on, look for the Vested Interests”.

So it was that the passionate energy regenerated by the collision of my SELF with the SELF of Lady Jaye became our very own Little Big Bang calling into question ALL our inherited conditioning, our sexual identities until we found our SELVES referring to the prevailing status quo… “nonsensus reality.”

S/he (Lady Jaye) was biologically 24 years old and female, 5 feet and 10 inches with a women’s size 7-8 shoe size and 36 x 22 x 34 inch figure. S/he topped off that supermodel body with a Brian Jones (of The Rolling Stones) blonde pageboy/shag haircut, the naughtiest, most compelling ever twinkle in her brown eyes. On the day that we met Lady Jaye, she informed me “…if you can’t run for and catch an MTA bus in 5 inch high heels you shouldn’t wear them”. Watching her demonstrate this speed running in 5-inch “pumps” (as they are known here), wearing the tiniest “pussy grazer” mini skirt with the “essential accessory”, a cigarette, s/he was indubitably New York born and bred. Or, as s/he preferred, s/he was the “ARBITER OF ELEGANCE.” And, s/he was insanely, incredibly sexy. WHY?

As a teenager we came from an age where there were NO porno magazines, no sex education. Severe censorship in the cinema and even books now considered classics like Henry Miller’s “Tropics”, William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch”, Jean Genet’s “Thief’s Journal”, and many others were considered obscene and prosecuted as such. So my knowledge of even the rudiments of sex came from other boys at all male schools and our often exaggerated discussions during naïve but erotic circle jerks. Our first constructs of sexiness begin there, right then, at the time we are exposed to combinations of orgasms and images, from the taboo and suppressed to the popular.

We grew up in a household of three generations of biological women.My grandmother, my mother and my elder sister. We vividly recall watching my sister having her long hair brushed and being jealous of the entire process. The sound, the sensuous length which was at that time taboo for males, the communal aspect of a somehow secret circle rooted in the “privilege” of being female. We also found it baffling that women’s clothes were so various and exotic, colorful and ever-changing with fashion’s whims. We felt unreasonably deprived. Why couldn’t men wear glamorous and multi-layered clothes, distinctive make-up and limitless hairstyles? It was early on, about 10 years old, that the trappings and apparent freedoms of style and display we associated with being a woman became erotic, certainly, but also, more than sexiness, they represented an oppression of my outward expression of sexuality and sensuality through display and gesture. Somehow for me, femininity in all its outward guises became inextricably linked with sexiness. The fact that it was a taboo for a biological male to desire “peacockiness”, never mind to speak of coveting the apparent freedoms of women added another layer to my burgeoning triggers of desire. We found that anything erotic that was inappropriate, or considered “perverted” turned me on and generated an ever deepening urge to explore and experience it. Or was it that anything inappropriate to the prevailing modality was by the very nature of BEING “verboten” erotically magnetic?

When we were born we were considered in great danger from being extremely underweight. All my childhood became a battle to try and make me eat, and we were forced to drink strange protein concoctions called “Complan” to try and fatten me up. My nickname at school was “Auschwitz”. Oddly enough Lady Jaye was also a sickly child, always considered too skinny and was even also called “Auschwitz” at school. Just a couple of many, many conjunctions and synchronous similarities we discovered after we met. But, to return to my teens where my concepts and imprints of sexiness were developed and imprinted. Mine was the era of Twiggy. The androgynous boy-like girl image seemed to permit a cross-over that might liberate cross-dressing. We will carry a wish to be as skinny as Twiggy to the grave. To this day we retain a small but cherished collection of Twiggy memorabilia. The other critical addition to my ever more formed standards of sexiness was the television program “The Avengers”. We would try to see every episode on a Saturday night, fascinated by the character Emma Peel who wore skin tight leather cat suits with buckles and belts, knee high boots and a violently effective karate kick. The Avengers brought fetish into my world, though we were unsophisticated enough at 15 to know little about its more specific role in sexual practice.

Amongst my peers the basic, and to me base, urge to simply fuck was everything. Boys wanted to fuck to prove their manhood, and women did everything they could to deny that pleasure. For me, the mere act of fucking was already a mundane idea by age 12 or perhaps younger. My tastes were for complexity.  Starved of sexual imagery in photos, films or on TV we were forced to imagine what might transpire with a willing partner and the very act of persuasion, far from being frustrating to me, was satisfying and exciting. Simple surrender was not sexy. It turned out that what we pictured in our fantasy exploits was already beyond the socially acceptable norm long before we lost our so-called virginity. Oral sex, anal sex, group sex, mutual mastu

rbation were all in my imaginary repertoire. It came as a shock to me as we began to explore the delights of the flesh that our desires far outmatched the menu available. So we lived a dual existence. What it was possible to persuade a lover to do, and what we pictured in a future as we did it.

Sexiness for me became very much about what occurred in my mind and with that self realization my quest began to search for a person. An ultimate sexual mate to explore every nuance of possibility with.

A final point perhaps worth noting is the explosion of neo-dandyism that happened as psychedelia hit the British mod-scene in the mid-sixties. Suddenly people like Brian Jones dressed in silks and brocades, grew their hair long and it became acceptable for the male to be as meticulousl

y exotic and flamboyant visually as they could afford or imagine. This permission briefly bloomed across the Flower Children era in 1967-69 in England. Then it was sadly drowned in a sea of denim and tie-dye Grateful Dead t-shirts, except, in particular, amongst rock musicians. We mention this because it relates to my personal experience in terms of aging. This androgynous gender ambiguity gave public permission to those of us feeling constricted by convention to create a personal SELF regardless of any status quo or social norm. We have exercised that generous freedom ever since.

These formulative imprints of “sexiness” we believe become fixed templates for all that comes after. This is why so many men remain fixated on young adolescent women. Its not just the scent of youth, nor the porcelain smoothness of new skin, not even the irresistible hormonal rush of lus

t within passion. We each create an individual, personal stereotype that we crave over and over. We are forever repeating our fetishes and fantasies over and over in a perpetual loop. We may hide this archetype we have assembled, consciously or unconsciously, but we remain forever vulnerable to it, seeking this unattainable yet precious and unique embodiment of perfection throughout our lives. For some of us as obsessively as one seeks spiritual truth.

My search took me through various forms of relationships.

Because my totem for “sexiness” was solidified early in my life, we sought out partners who initially seemed to exhibit enough of my required characteristics to potentially be, or become my ideal. So strong and clear was my template of desire that it led me to damage perfectly healthy relationships by pressuring and persuading lovers to explore my fetishes in order to please me. Needless to say all our lovers had already passed the skinny test! As time went by we found ourself unconsciously being drawn towards women who worked in some area of the sex industry. Usually, without knowing it in advance, we would find those objects of our affections to be strippers, performers in porn films, dominatrices and topless go-go dancers. We found it easier to socialize and converse with women who were at ease with their sexuality and erotic potential. We did not identify with the male gaze or the male audience. Rather we felt a kinship with the women. In fact we imagined being them, flaunting and taunting from within a female anatomy. Just as we had coveted my sister’s privilege to have long hair and dazzling clothes when young, so now we fantasized having breasts and vagina and being an embodiment of worldly sensuality and display.

So somewhere along the line our masturbatory fantasies were no longer about finding the perfect example of my fetishized ideal, but about merging the one desiring with the desired. In fact even that is not quite right because it implies too strong an aspect of narcissism which would be incorrect. There is, of course an element of narcissism but the aspect of MERGING was the real key to this situation being sexy, whether imagined or physically realized.

In fact as time went by we found each new relationship was a little closer to satisfying and manifesting sexiness. And our picture of that sexiness had grown and evolved. It still required skinniness, smooth flawless skin, but it also became essential for there to be no pubic hair, Why? Not, as is often, sometimes angrily assumed, because of anything to do with pre-pubescence.

Well in 1981 we began getting genital piercings and tattoos in intimate areas from a practitioner called Mr Sebastian. He it was, who pointed out that pubic hair and body hair over tattoos and piercings covered and spoiled them. That they should be displayed clearly and never hidden. Since that sage advice we have not only shaved as much of our body hair as we can reach, but all my lovers have shaved too and we find it well nigh impossible to eroticise a vagina with pubic hair! Sexiness came to include this smooth state. We also found that we love vaginas and love to see them in their glory. To hide them away seems a sin.

Sexiness, therefore, if it is actively explored and contemplated, becomes more sophisticated, more detailed and in many ways as a result more demanding of both of us in our quest and of those we desire. So many males just wallow in lust, content to achieve orgasms and little else. In those instances, aging reduces pleasure  physically through jaded familiarity. The orgasm chaser maintains sexiness only by switching partners, regenerating the initial thrill of novelty and “conquest” but it’s a sexiness of diminishing returns.

The roué, the person, male or female who has a complex combination of fetishes and qualities that can be infinitely rearranged in different orders, degrees and amounts need never get bored or fall into the mundane. Even when a male can no longer “perform” there are unlimited variations of pleasure, just as many mental as biological.

We count ourself blessed that when we met Lady Jaye in 1993 s/he not only was physically my ideal and still perfecting, but s/he was superbly versed in the nuances of being a professional dominatrix and s/he was a licensed nurse! What more could we want than a lover who looked like a fashion model (my Twiggy!) who had no inhibitions or limitations sexually, and who was more than willing to  explore any new variation or fantasy that might occur and who saw gender stereotypes as pointless obstructions. Lady Jaye embodied all the qualities, sacred and profane, we had ever sought in a lover and was an absolute of “sexiness”.

Sexiness for me, by the way, is not something innate, or common to all, nor does it develop for everyone at puberty. That should be obvious despite the advertising industry trying to homogenize sexuality and attraction, beauty and desirability. Sexiness is a malleable thing with infinite potential limited only by our imaginations or bodily constraints.

We have always been shocked at the confident ease and self assuredness of so many people. They seem confident that the mere possession of genitals alone makes them sexy and special.  We have never taken it for granted that anyone could ever find me “sexy”. We are not fortunate enough to have a natural confidence in our qualities as a lover. Despite having had the great fortune to have known and had relationships with very special, sexually daring women prepared to experiment and grow in areas normally considered perverse and taboo, despite that, not one fully convinced me we were special, or truly sexy, truly desirable. Their assurances never quite made it to my centre, where whatever is my pure SELF resides. So we always felt hollow, unfulfilled and alone, still seeking a dream. Sexiness never felt completely genuine. We remained unconvinced…

Lady Jaye changed all that and became the first woman to truly make me BELIEVE…believe we were unique, wonderfully sexy, the perfect lover. S/he told me we were made for each other and fitted together perfectly. When we made love the very first time my age was 44 years old. S/he was just turned 25. We had waited a year to be certain we were as deeply in love as we believed before making love. There’s a first time for everything! When we DID make love it was like no other time in either of our lives. We both knew something incredibly precious was occurring and we were both in awe and a little afraid of its power. It was the most perfect moment of our lives and suddenly sexiness, fantasies, fetishes and the like were meaningless because in that amazing moment joined together we had reached every place ever desired simultaneously and transcended our frail imaginations. We both knew we had really found our “Other Half” and THAT union, that merging of two into one is sexiness and is beyond age or even physical existence.

We fell in love at first sight, quite literally. We were together almost every day for 14 years. We never got bored. We felt just as lucky, just as horny at the end of our earthly time together as we did that first time we made love. Perhaps Lady Jaye somehow knew s/he would die that day? S/he recreated our first lovemaking day for me. Pampered me rotten, took me for breakfast at a diner like that first day and we made stupendous, mind shattering, Divine love. S/he alone convinced me that it was me that was sexiness to her, nobody else. We felt the same way about her.

We found our SELF a widower at 57 years old. With the best will in the world, past our prime. Worse still, without Lady Jaye’s reinforcement and insistence that we were beautiful, we felt ugly again. Uglier than ever before, because we knew what we had lost was a magick mirror that reflected the best of me back. There was nothing sexual left to explore, for we had taken each other everywhere we could possibly have contemplated. My earlier fantasy of “being” the female sex worker had even been realized when s/he and we worked together as dominatrices in a dungeon. We lost our perfect partner overnight leaving me resigned to being left alone and sexless by death.

Sexiness now is all those details we built up over years and years that we ultimately found personified in one person, Lady Jaye. Because the last thing we did together was make blissful wild love and within minutes s/he was dead in my arms, we associate grief, loss, and pain beyond words with sex. The two are jumbled up, Eros and Thanatos. But it is not an intellectual consideration. Not a clever essay by an academic. It is a real trauma and it has left me numbed.

By losing everything we had ever desired or dared to even hope for at this age (we are now 60 as we write) we find it impossible to think anyone could ever desire me. My own minimum requirements in a lover of youth, energy, no limiting sexual conditions, skinniness and so on seem presumptuous when we cannot fulfill them in return…who could possibly want this being, so insecure, so self critical and still in love with another? So, while my ideal of sexiness has not changed, aging inevitably reduces the possibility of its recovery or discovery. Maybe other people can be more realistic in their expectations…mine remain the same as they were way back when we first began to fantasize and masturbate.

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divas and drag: performance artist kalup linzy on singing and acting http://www.janestown.net/2010/09/divas-and-drag-a-chat-with-performance-artist-kalup-linzy/ Thu, 23 Sep 2010 22:15:09 +0000 http://www.janestown.net/?p=202 If you’ve never seen one of Kalup Linzy’s campy send-ups of soap opera stars and music divas, you must! Riffing story lines from classic programs like As the World Turns and General Hospital, these video works splice together drag performances with footage from actual episodes in spoofs only a devoted soap  fan could concoct. Linzy writes, directs, and acts in all of the works, which mimic the ludicrous plot lines and relationship dramas from a queer, African-American sensibility.  “Part Richard Pryor, part RuPaul” (according to this website), his scantily clad, wigged performances bring a whole new dimension to female impersonation, playing with notions of  masculinity and celebrity culture along the way.

Linzy’s music videos do much the same, conveying a love of melodrama and stagecraft that is pure camp.  With titles like How Kontessa Got Her Groove Back, and  Labisha’s Top Five Break-Up Song, and laugh-out loud-lyrics (“Here I am, I’m waitin’ baby. I’m in the Lover’s Hotel. Watching the neon sign…I’m waitin’ baby. Oh, the L just went out on the neon sign — now I’m reading a sign that say’s Over’s Hotel. But I’m waitin’ baby, I’m waitin. Oh-Oh, now the S just went out and its Over Hotel…Are you tryin to tell me something, baby?”), Linzy is indeed “A True Original Talent”.  That accolade comes from none other than comedian Molly Shannon, and is featured prominently on his website, Linzy no doubt reveling in both its honor and irony.

The mini-interview conducted here came about after I learned that  the artist is, in fact, quite shy in person (nothing like the over-the-top personas he so brilliantly conceives and adapts on video). This isn’t unusual among truly gifted performer, but  I got curious about how he started to sing and act in the first place, so asked him.

JH: Hey Kalup! So tell me when did you first realize you liked to sing and perform? Are there any specific childhood memories or influences that come to mind?

KL: I grew up singing in the gospel choir and i was influenced by relatives; also watching my older cousins in church plays. later, the passion came stronger when i was introduced to soap operas, also through my family.

JH: I love to sing myself, but am too shy to do so in public ala karaoke, etc. how did you overcome this? And why does dressing up or going into comedic character make it easier, as it often does for performers. Is it just the safety and distance of masquerade?

KL: I’m more intimidated by walking up to a stranger and saying hello. there is a lot of distance in creating a character, so yeah, that probably is the reason I use characters!

JH: You also seem to engage collaboration as both a process and a philosophy to guide your work, no?

KL: Actually, I’m not sure that collaboration guides my work. I collaborate when there is an intersection between another artist and myself. for example, I know gender is important physically, but I think physically and spiritually there are other things you can connect to in a person that go beyond gender or race. That was one of the ideas I was working with. I never know if people get that out of the videos. Spirit and essence are like different personas and characters.

JH: Who, musically, most inspires you – and your work – at this moment?

KL: I’m still inspired by Erykah Badu, while Rhiana is growing on me in a different way, and there’s these two openly gay rappers Last Offence, and Bry’Nt…and also, I like DJ Rupture a lot.

Born in Stuckey, Florida, Linz graduated from the MFA program at the University of South Florida in 2003, and in 2005 became the sleeper hit in the Studio Museum of Harlem’s influential group exhibition, Frequency. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 2007, with a 2008 Creative Capital Grant in tow. His work was recently seen in The Whitney  Museum’s Off The Wall: Part 1 – Thirty Performative Actions, and currently in Contemporary Art From the Collection ( MoMA).

For more information, go to http://www.kaluplinzy.net/

and check out these vids on youtube:

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