MASS0031
death and desire in this other because people were sex they were having.”
It gets to the root of what’ s actually productive about thinking about queerness. Like, in a legalistic sense when people 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.
Yeah, if you made paintings on this topic, it would be less articulated. It would probably leave too much space for interpretation. use an example in painting, let’ s To say you came away from this scene
and you’ re like,“ Oh, I’ m gonna paint men shooting up meth and having crazy 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 complicated 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 discussion 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 bodies developed out of the need to represent 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 representing something- it’ s already overdetermined, 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 laboratory for inventing new vocabularies of experience and talking about things that people are already doing but not using the vocabularies that we’ ve been given already.