MASS0031
death and desire in this
other because people were
sex they were having.”
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.
T
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.