In England, where for the first six months of the millennium I lived and ostensibly studied but largely smoked hash and enjoyed an unprecedented and never-to-be repeated dominance in intramural basketball, all the swans are the property of the Queen. Arcane British laws make it illegal to kill, eat, stuff and even transport the remains of any swan anywhere within the British Isles. Nevertheless, my flatmate Kirsten's mother bravely brought a taxidermied swan from Edinburgh to Oxford for Kirsten to use in the final group show.
Kirsten was the first performance artist I'd ever met. Throughout the semester I was at Oxford she told me a bit about the work of her idol, Maria Abramovic, and her own past performances, which included a misunderstood attempt at re-enacting a young Jewish girl's flight from the Nazis. (She'd shaved her head and attempted to survive in the woods somewhere in Poland for a few weeks and caught a lot of flack for it from indignant types who were more upset about genocide being re-enacted as art than they were about its actuality in many corners of the globe.)
Still, nothing could quite prepare me for the spectacle of her final work with the swan. While everyone else's paintings and installations sat quietly in the whitewashed galleries, Kirsten proceeded to mourn her swan in one of the upstairs rooms of the art building, topless. It was a deeply moving, well-planned and well-executed work that has stayed with me to this day, nearly a decade later.
For many hours, Kirsten alternately cradled the swan in her arms and prostrated herself before it, dragging herself slowly across the floor, keening. In the process the dead swan's limp neck and black, rubbery beak slumped and tumbled against her bare breasts. In what I then thought was English restraint but I now realize was a form of proto-hipster detachment, the spectators at the art show took this in stride. As you entered the room, the people you passed on their way out would mildly comment, "There's a bird in there, and she's got her top off, and she's holding a dead bird." ("Bird" in England is a slang term for a girl, like "chick" in the U.S.) They might have remarked that, "she's got her tits out," another perfectly English construction. In America we say someone shows their tits, but we never say so simply and elegantly, that someone has their tits
out. There was, in fact, a girl at the college where I studied at Oxford who everyone referred to as "Tits-Out Jess," and when I asked why, they said, "Because she always gets her tits out." The matter-of-factness of the language superimposed on the lewdness of the situation has always encapsulated everything about England that simultaneously endears and eludes me about that rainy nation.
Following this faintly bemused but nonplussed description of the bird with her tits out holding a dead bird, you'd enter the room to find my flatmate crawling half-naked across the floor as people milled around (or rather, in England, milled about), engaged in a tender wrestling match with a snowy white dead swan and a vast and terrible grief.
Kirsten really was a terrific performance artist. Not that I put much stake in the artistic assessments of academics, but the examiners at Oxford awarded her a rare first-class degree. (In British universities you receive no grades that matter until a massive final exam--or in the case of art students, degree project--that gets a grade of first, second or third class, and this grade is cruelly and reductively applied to your entire degree.) For the examination performance, if I recall correctly, Kirsten stripped entirely naked, burned all of her previous works of art, smeared the ash on the walls and then on her own naked body, and then lit a chandelier full of sambuca aflame. I did not see this performance as it was closed to the public, but I would pay good money to see the three Oxford art examiners squinting over their spectacles at the sight of my flatmate smearing her naked body with ash under a flaming chandelier.
The first performance I saw Kirtsten do involved her sewing herself into a burlap sack and then blindly climbing a tree in the graveyard of one of Oxford's many impressively medieval colleges. She crawled around the tree for a while, then climbed down and went inside one of the tombs, where she lay on the floor and peed on herself. I didn't actually know until later that she'd peed on herself. At the wine and cheese reception afterwards Kirsten graciously received her guests as if she had just shown a slideshow of an archeological dig or maybe given a talk on some rare disease and not climbed a tree while sewn into a burlap sack and then peed on herself in a medieval tomb. She led a few of us over to where she'd been lying and said, "Oh, dear, there's really not much of a puddle there at all, is there? Next time I'll have to remember drink more beforehand."
It was a rare moment of insight into the mind of a performance artist, and I have never forgotten it, or her.
Labels: England, Kirsten, performance art, swans, taxidermy
I am breaking my record-breaking silence to bring you some news.
First of all, a short essay appears in an online publication called
Killing the Buddha. It is
here. There will also be a reading on Tuesday August 5 at
Pacific Standard at 7 p.m, where on Tuesdays they have "various $3 drink specials."
It's been quiet for some time on SuperLefty, but not because I have nothing to say. I have been working on longer things intended for print publication. Things utilizing thousands of words instead of mere hundreds, or a mere lone thousand! Tens of thousands of words, not to say hundreds of thousands of words, each carefully chosen by me personally for your reading pleasure.
So be patient, and do not lose faith, and do not abandon this non-place in non-space completely, for I will not completely abandon it, or you. But it is time for new things, bigger things, dare I say better things to come to fruition.
During my record-breaking silence this web site turned five. It is five years old, as is my day job in its current incarnation, which I like to call, Freelance Or Die!. For many years I have considered getting a Freelance Or Die! tattoo, but instead I got one that's a little bit more open to interpretation.
Me my little bro went and got tattooed together for his 25th birthday. Right on our inner forearms, you know, where they take the blood from. Because we are blood! To the end! It's pretty much our sibling motto, but I've found it can mean a lot of different things, depending on how you look at it on any given day. I've also found I cannot control how it (or anything) is perceived or interpreted by other people. One of my students, a rather adorably morose indie rock emo type, took one look and said, "Is that like, 'Shoot heroin, right here, to the end?'"
This picture above shows it nice and fresh. It's since healed up and flattened out a bit, but I like it raw, the better to see how my very own handwriting was inked into my very own flesh with a sharp needle.
"It's my first tattoo," I told the fully sleeved tattoo artist.
"Then you'll always remember me," he said, wiping and shaving my arm with authority. So far, he was right. His name is "Jon" with no "h."
I had been curious and anxious to get a tattoo. I can report to my untattooed readers that while it was technically painful it was really no big deal, though this tattoo took about as long to ink as it would to write with a pen, so my pain threshold was not tested to Rambo-esque levels. It was tested somewhere beyond mosquito-bite levels, though not the enormous mosquito that bit me in Vermont and left a dime-sized bloodstain on the collar of my thermal, which was kind of cool, as if I'd been hickeyed by a vampire.
Now it is summer and I have packed the calendar and emptied my bank account planning travels near and far. And so I am chock full of checklists, never unpacking my bags. What good is money if it does not turn into experience? If it does not become experience I will turn it into dresses and crab cakes. And it is experience, not dresses or crab cakes, that turns into the stories, because as I've always said,
You can't make this shit up. Or at least I can't.
So sit tight, and keep summering and keep stopping by. I may go quiet but I will never go away. Your SuperLefty is always with you, dear readers!
To the end!
Labels: maintenance, reading, tattoo, update
