Some people are deliciously shameless and make me wish I was shameless too, but I have always been so full of shame. Saturated with it, very squeamish, sometimes prudish. I say desire and then say “BUT NOT IN A SEXUAL WAY NOT IN AN EXPLICITLY EROTIC WAY YOU KNOW THE INTELLECTUAL VERSION OF EROTICISM WHERE YOU ARE HORNY WITH YOUR BRAIN NOT YOUR CUNT NOT YOUR BODY NOT FOR SOMEONE ELSE BUT FOR SOMEONE ELSE’S WORDS AND THOUGHTS MY EROTICISM IS AN EVOLVED EROTICISM. But I, who aim for loftiness, am still made of matter, bone, flesh, blood, spit and holes that I long to fill, not only in my mind but in other places too. Eileen Myles, who provides a foreword to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick writes that she “marches boldly into self-abasement and self-advertisement.”
I recently made a video work, the captions of which are partially inspired by Goethe’s surprisingly sexual botanical writings and when “delicate parts” shows up on the screen and I make eye contact with someone in the room, I blush.
I protect myself by intellectualizing, making work about ancient (erotic) poetry instead of about the time I went to Italy with an ex and it was both the most depressing and the most romantic thing I’ve ever done, or the time I baked a pie and ate it all by myself in a single day. I say with my work, please forget I have a body, for sometimes it disgusts me. Its wants are so base, so disappointing. The wantneedthrob of hunger or sex less worthy of being made art than more cerebral wants. The soreness of fucking and eating too much so much less heroic than the fullness of a mind reading, a stiff neck. If Eileen Myles was writing about me, I fear that she would not claim that I stand on the cliff of my life. But perhaps this is also what my work is about: my waiting for something to turn into obsession. I’m waiting for things to be less boring. I’m waiting for a pie I am not embarrassed to eat in a single day, a pie to eat with pride, a lust to feel with pride, a pride in being consumed and in consuming, “a chance of understanding something and [going] on living.”