0030MASS
“People will be writing about
eternal dance with each
literally dying because of the
MASS0031
death and desire in this
other because people were
sex they were having.”
There needs to be a way to talk about
it that doesn’t just pathologize the be-
haviour.
So the way I’m thinking about it - I don’t
necessarily have a framework for thinking
about it yet, but it’s more a case of just
stripping back the problems that I see with
other ways of talking about it.
With drug use: what is acceptable about
prescribing
methamphetamine-derived
substances to children who can’t focus
on things, or to office workers that aren’t
productive enough, and then wrong about
people taking it to enhance their own plea-
sure? So, where do we draw that line. And
then with sexuality, where is it okay... So
basically it’s still an open question.
Why do you choose such art mediums as
sewing and performance?
or me—it’s a really banal observation,
but clothes and the way that people
dress, it always felt really important to
me. I don’t think about it that consciously,
but it’s a way that I work through my own
identity and the way that I think about who
I am. It’s just intuitive to me that there is
something queer about caring about your
clothing.
T
F
Do you think it is just a comfortable medium
to go about the topics that you care about?
es. This isn’t something that i’ve had to
articulate in a big way, but there is this
kind of relationship between fashion and
queer sexuality, it has this kind of symbi-
otic relationship in some ways. There has
always been an obsession in queer culture
with fashion and beauty. There’s this weird
back and forth between them.
Y
Performance?
ell, the idea of the performative in general seems a little overused at this point. It’s just a base-
line observation for me that something like identity is performed, so performance is a natural
posture for me. That just makes sense to me.
W
Yeah, if you made paintings on this topic,
it would be less articulated. It would prob-
ably leave too much space for interpreta-
tion.
o use an example in painting, let’s
say you came away from this scene
and you’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna paint
men shooting up meth and having cra-
zy sex,” and did a series of paintings
- you wouldn’t be implicated in it, and
that feels important to me. Because I
have a really complicated relationship
with this thing and have really compli-
cated feelings about it, and if I were to
make an object and throw it out into the
world and say, “This is my comment on
this thing” I would feel really weird that
I was not attached to it anymore, even
though I would be in some ways. I feel
like I need to be directly implicated in
the comment I’m making or the discus-
sion that I want to start. Performance is
my attempt to think through this, and I
don’t want to put that on anyone else
by representing them. In terms of my
interest in what it means to represent
queerness, the legibility of queer bod-
ies developed out of the need to repre-
sent their sickness - representations of
queerness came about because people
were dying, because they were seen as
a threat to public health, and that was
the challenge and the urgency of queer
representation in the 80s and 90s.
It feels like a double bind we haven’t
gotten out of, that if you’re represent-
ing something - it’s already overdeter-
mined, you’re just kind of playing in
an already-existing vocabulary. With
something like performance, I think the
hope is that there is something kinda
provisional and experimental about it,
and I like to think about it as a laborato-
ry for inventing new vocabularies of ex-
perience and talking about things that
people are already doing but not using
the vocabularies that we’ve been given
already.
It gets to the root of what’s actually productive about think-
ing about queerness. Like, in a legalistic sense when peo-
ple are like, “We want rights,” I have some sort of belief that
there’s still something valuable about queerness separate
from achieving equality with heteronormative relationships.
I’m not interested in achieving “normality”, I think there is
some other productive work.