Feels different in here than it looks to them - modeling does - private jobs with photographers - they are nothing like quick pose for a sketch class. I don't think he feels me evolving/decaying with the moments - faltering/prevailing - tension manifest to the visual eye as skin - it doesn't feel to me that he does. With quick sketch, pen and pencil and chalk - I am writing poetry in slow motion with my body instead of my words - as if alone. Simple. The artists can pick, reinterpret or transcribe what they like - or come up with their own ideas for where the lines should be, but I am not - perhaps what I lack suggests what they need. But. Standing in front of a camera - it's all about his intent - I am an object. He thinks I am naked but that would have to be a choice - of mine - and I do not choose to be naked with him. I don't know why his fingernails are blood black - like every one of them was hit with a hammer - HARD - but my eyes keep straying back to them. He has me standing behind a bunch-crumple of plastic - semi-clear cloudy sheets and the windows with all the sun that's warm but doesn't penetrate -and I am just shy of a shiver - even though it's something like being in a green house - washed out and standing still and I don't even know what his lense is focused on -
torso shots. He tells me:
"I've been accused of performing acts of violence against women by cutting their heads off in my photos - but - uh - even if that's true - which I don't think it is - it's pretty innocent."
I didn't say anything to this - he didn't seem to expect a response - just started tearing (strategically placed) holes in the plastic and having me reposition: "Turn a little more towards me - goodstop - can you hold that?"
yes of course i can staring at his hands again - fingers on the buttonshutter (really really black) and i want to ask but don't because it would be rude and i can feel my boob sticking out of one of the holes in the plastic and it feels really ... bad - like it HAS been cut off - and magnified - and you would have no idea, looking at his photos, that black fingers took them and i have no idea if anything we are doing here is any "good." comes back to his intent: is his heart seeking to create art or is he just looking at a boob sticking out of plastic cuz he likes that sort of thing.
is this art or should i just patiently wait for an internal apocalypse. more ruins to wander - do I abandon myself.
that same night, i'm at an art gallery with mark and meg. some show for sculptures made from found objects. what is it with all the wire? it's everywhere - and even weirder, meg points out the artist - over there - (her??!!!) a vary fashionable lady in very expensive shoes clicking about in the center of her creation - room after room of things that seem to be designed to feel horrible inside me, personally. trying to make a statement - a real, innovative, edgy artist - have a beer take a look wear a fur or blood up or wear all black and live large and small talk and be flambouyant avante garde serious statements about .... yes. this is really something ... different.
meg and mark are talking about some of the local female artists that just "... garden, live off their husbands and paint.' i don't feel so good, and don't tell them that i stood for just such a woman for 7 hours in a garden last week - a commission piece for the denver art museum - she ended up not even using it. holding one position for that long becomes incredibly painful - but you don't want to bother the suffering artist.
"How would you describe what's here?" Mark asks me. I think I just said, "I wouldn't ..." - though I was thinking, 'explosion at the dry cleaners' - what with all the wire hangers. He says "We're all being raped again aren't we?" I'm not sure what he means; he is so beautiful but right now I feel disappointed, at large - in that beauty. Especially right now, I needed it and ... ... ... I'm not saying men don't have a right to talk about that word as if they truly understand it, but I wonder. I do wonder.
Sitting amidst all this shit and I'm asked to describe what is here. I just wonder WHY we are still here, being angry and disapproving - and why this display bothers me SO MUCH. Why don't we just ... go rather than stay in a place we don't like? Free beer. So are we really so much different than the artist herself or all her admirers - and she has them -I can hear them 'admiring.' So I say to Mark, and I think the comment seemed a bit odd to both of us, but I still needed to say it: We are nothing but our sins until we quit seeing them in others.
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