Category Archives: Guest Bloggers

Is that subtext, or are you just happy to see me?

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By Luke Hortle

Throat-clearing.
Last night I went to hear Ellen Dissanayake’s lecture, ‘The Deep Structure of the Arts’, which was about the role of art in human evolution. I went because I thought I should, cringing slightly because the whole thing sounded too damnably Mona-ish, and left feeling awkward—not because of the lecture or Dissanayake’s ideas (which were methodical and measured, although I craved a more emphatic statement of her argument), but because of the awkward atmosphere of the question time that followed. Awkward, because the long-winded monologues were not questions, and setting them loose in the lecture hall shifted the mood. The air between people thickened. It felt compromising to be situated within a group of other humans. A caveat: I’m not sure if this awkwardness was objectively so, or more a self-absorbed by-product of my own thought-stream, which is decidedly awkward and neurotic anyway, regardless of any objective social scenario. Performing the opposite of that state of mind is probably a necessity of contemporary social interaction, unless you’re a ‘creative’ and can get away with a whole lot of really irritating shit while other people make excuses for your unconventional and fucking vexing disposition. (Also, I didn’t take a pen and paper.)

The guts of it.
Dissanayake argued in the lecture that art, or ‘artification’ as the behaviour of making art, has a deep structure, and one that is comparable to the deep structure of language advocated for by some linguists and psychologists. She claims that this behaviour is essential and intrinsic to being human. That it’s innate and natural. That it’s universal. She argues that this behaviour has evolutionary benefits. Apparently, behaviours such as singing and dancing with other people produce a hormone called oxytocin, which is also elicited during sex. One of the benefits of oxytocin is that it counteracts cortisol, a stress hormone. I’d like a clarification though. Do you only get the oxytocin hit if you’re having sex with another person, or can you replenish your hormonal stores by treating yourself (singular) to a nice night in?

***
Interlude: A masturbatory call to arms

No one ever talks interestingly about masturbation. Faux Mo flashback: I’m in a darkened cinema and it’s black-bruised-red like the insides of a vital organ. A woman is dancing naked in front of hundreds of pissed people, alternately with a black sack over her head or wearing a gorilla mask. I’m trying to work out what to think of it, when a young balding guy, not unattractive, stands next to me, grinning, and asks, ‘Do you reckon she’s going to flick the bean?’ Oh Christ. If this is indicative of masturbation discourse (and I suspect it might be) then I’m putting a call out for people to lift their game. Pun entirely intended.

***

I can’t comment on the scientific validity of Dissanayake’s claims; I don’t know enough (read: not much at all) about evolutionary biology and I’m not remotely interested in making those kinds of comments about her work. It’s boring (that kind of discussion; not her research, necessarily). My main problem with the lecture was her use of the word ‘human’. It became an oblique invocation of the term, which was disappointingly predictable. Using ‘human’ in such a way is commonplace, but that shouldn’t equate to an excuse. ‘Human’ has a subtext. An uncontainable one. Bare it. Refusal to do so turns use of the word into an act of effacement. It becomes another form of exclusory language, and one that relates only, within the parameters of Dissanayake’s argument, to those types of humans that enjoy regular heterosexual sex and the possibility, and propensity, for procreation. Speaking of the human, and using the term in a critically savvy manner, has to be provisional. I suspect I’m against its use as a commonplace and absolute term because it kills my identity politics boner. Yours too. Oh, the critical impotence. Humanness, particularly in the context of evolution, is anything but a constant or endpoint or intellectual dead-end. If we’re speaking of evolution (and we don’t have to be, not really, not if you don’t want to, but we are), then using ‘human’ as a static term sets up a disconnect with the premise and ideological underpinning of the subject matter. Being human is a state of modulation, of unfinished-ness, regardless of how aware we are of this process. Being human isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a matter of common sense. In other words (and with some quite unrelated, juvenile, yet suspiciously apt imagery), it’s an intellectually stimulating cock and it’s happy to see you.

It boils down to this: given the broad and fascinating cultural implications of Dissanayake’s research into the origins of art as a human behaviour, with art seen as a shaping force of humanness, linguistic and experiential invocations of the ‘human’ demand to be given the commensurate critical attention they deserve.

Death illiterate.
As an English graduate, I’m supposed to be interested in how being human is culturally produced, rather than how it is inherently and essentially substantiated. I get trapped between thinking about myself as a culturally and linguistically realised entity, and the biological reality of my humanness. Because if I’m biologically and genetically human, if I am irrefutably so, then why am I even talking about this? Why are discussions of humanness, life and species booming in politics, the arts and that ever so sexy world of critical theory? Are we just a narcissistic species?

It’s particularly pertinent now, in this contemporary moment, to think about this. Contemporary anxieties, and the various discourses they infiltrate, are underpinned by an almost unspoken fear of extinction. (I could be inflammatory and drop the ‘C’ bomb—climate change—but I won’t.) Perhaps it’s the reality of living out our humanness, the reality of being a species—to be perennially haunted by various other states, those innumerable modes of not-life. The bottom line: we face the fact of our own death, and perhaps our broader concerns with extinction work to absolve personal responsibility for having to deal with the relatively imminent occurrence of our own dying. An implicit choosing of collective anxiety over the personal realities of being a fleshy composite with an expiry date.

I don’t know how to think about my own death. The pure facts of its reality are subsumed, immediately, by the romance of the language I use to talk about it. The word itself, ‘death’, is shockingly seductive. And biologically, I’m at a loss. The biological facts of my bodily aliveness refuse to cross the threshold of my conscious awareness. I can’t ruminate on them. They might enable my consciousness, but they never become usable and recognisable terms within that swarming and personalised mindfuck. Biological subtext, rather than readable narrative. Ungraspable, even in their physical immediacy. It’s terrifying.

Synaesthesia

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By Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

There are so many ways a thing can make you shiver. A cello in a crowd. A chorus in a stairwell. A story about a child who didn’t stand up for another child. The fury of chilli and the honest, expected loyalty of a potato. A single note. The memory, a moment later, of that same note.

Morning. In the sun.

Conversations about heels.

Elizabeth wears them because Kirsha told her she should. And then because she discovered she loved them.

Angela doesn’t. She feels like a politician.

I always fall over. Lizzy thinks that’s a myth. Maybe it is.

Inside. The Void.

The first thing that I love:

A cello.

Pulls my guts out through my lungs and, coated in tears, drags them up my throat in a gasp and there’s everything I once thought I’d have and then thought I’d never need and now here it all is.

I want to drink the cello forever and already I’m sick of my own linguistic synaesthesing. But I do want to drink the cello.

At the beginning of this thing, and longing for the saturated, sleepy exhaustion of midnight.

And then a man in a black t-shirt, new for the day, towards me against the salmon-tide:

‘And so it goes’.

Later.

I find a room full of the throbbing, hypnotic reassurances of Philip Glass. Rhythmic certainties interrupted by uncertain pauses, and a mobile phone announcing some urgent communiqué from the world outside. The electronically generated xylophonic trill weaves itself easily into the milky notes of Glass’s intent, and I enjoy the absurdity of it.

Between Glass dances, the organist frantically shakes his wrists and fingers out, and the plants grow quietly in their wall-pockets at the other end of the room.

Later.

Five synaesthetes walk into a bar.

I’m not sure what comes next. But I think the joke is possibly arcane and probably offensive, and I decide not to pursue its invention.

Later still.

I think of a flautist I once knew, who had given up a professional career because her synaesthesia made performance (and especially rehearsal) too unbearable for her.

I wonder if this performance – in front of the busy Nolan snake, and splashed with cycling coloured light – is unpleasant for a synaesthete?

The subjectivity of humanity begins to preoccupy and mildly terrify me. I start scribbling incomprehensibly into my medium brown notebook. I write pages and pages and pages during the Mussorgsky, and it is so boring even I can’t bear to read it over afterwards.

Late evening. The Organ Room.

Kate Miller-Heidke is a glistening-polished jelly dessert with familiar and never-before-tasted tropical fruit. More saccharine at first than you think you wanted but then you discover you’re in love and, in all the sugar, what you taste is the whole world: the rind and the tang, the moon and the seas, the loss and the first times, poisons and wild animals.

She has a voice that doesn’t make sense coming from her small body. She sings about the past and about herself and about nothing sometimes, and she tells stories like she wants us to rise up and respond, or laugh at her, or be shocked, or maybe buy her a drink. She fills the already crowded room. She is bigger than herself. She becomes a way into the world.

Home
I’ve started to forget what I know about things. Or what I’ve heard. Started to think I’m making them up. Is there a story, for example, about David discussing the logo design, and saying ‘fuck it, let’s use fluoro pink: no-one uses fluoro pink’, and that’s how it came about? No? Well. It sounds plausible though, doesn’t it.


(De)Gustation

Saline

I saw a ghost and an angel while the chorus were painting the stairwell in Bowman and green and in blue light and in open vowels and in blood pooling softly across my chest.

He was magnificent and ordinary and dressed in white and in need of a haircut and the shape of a man and with eyes filled in sorrow and the everyday. He stood at the top of the stairwell and we made no contact and I stood near the bottom and by the Sanctus he was gone. I didn’t see him leave but I know he walked, down those back stairs, slipping quietly or with an excuse me, and the knowledge of him comforts me in no way you can imagine.

She was a sketch and a shadow and almost invisible amongst the resonance of the chorus. That chorus, haunting through the museum: cobwebs and sheets adrift in a hot, airless house. She slipped amongst them and was a shiver across their shoulders as they sang for us, sang for themselves, never once sang for her, sang for their childhoods and their immortality and their impossibilities.

And you didn’t see either of them.

Sour

I create restore points in time. I click something, somewhere, and I imagine that one day I’ll look back to this moment and I’ll try to re-feel all of it – someone I love sitting beside me, the air slightly cooler than my skin, the relentlessly gorgeous same-and-changing Glass patterns, the contented memory of kimchi, chilli, wasabi.

I wonder how long it would take me, in this space, to lose everything and become a throbbing, visceral echo of myself. Not long, I think. And what stops me? What holds me here? What holds you? What holds the ones you love? Is it the same thing that binds us all?

If this is the rabbit hole, I am already here. I’ve forgotten what I was following.

And the longer I’m here, the more uncomfortably mundane it all becomes. I see through the cracks and around the corners.

You can only eat so much, you know. It says a lot about a person, how they eat at a dessert buffet.

I met Alexandria at a dessert buffet. We were both standing beside the mousse, agonising. It said a lot about her, to me. And I suppose it said a lot about me. To her. I’ve never asked her, actually. I should. Should have.

See, if you know you love – and I mean love — the chocolate gateau, why would you go back, when you’re almost full and the party’s almost over, to try the passionfruit gelato? Just on the off chance that you’ll love it. Love it more than the chocolate gateau. Which you can never have again, by the way, because you’re full and the party was catered by a retiring pastry chef.

After a while, I start to wonder whether it matters at all.

The Messiaen is beautiful. So what if he saw golden Fmaj chords when he wrote it, and I don’t see them now?

Sugar
I’m holding your breath.

Bitterness

What if each time someone said your name, my mouth was filled with the idea of strawberries? What then? Or what if it wasn’t strawberries? What if it was the bitter disappointment of a lettuce leaf left too long before picking? A small, dark leaf perfectly formed, but carrying only ugly in its flavour? A tightening, lingering, wild-chicory of a bite. What if that metallic taste of regret was what accompanied you? Could I still love you?

Every touch of you is somehow unbelievable. Every brush of your tannin-tainted tongue is something I once longed for and now has no meaning. Where do such hauntings come from? Who turned us into this? I think there was a moment when I could have stopped it. This brakeless tumble towards loss. I remember. It was a winter morning but the sun was cruel against the tight cotton of my jeans. Your children were asleep – both of them, what a wonder. We sat together in their treehouse with a teapot full of sand, and we talked about politics and linguistics and the weather patterns of the antipodes. Something. I remember you opening the toy teapot and sliding one finger through the sand – I didn’t even know the children had a sandpit. I had only visited you in your house twice before, and both times in the unmooned darkness. This day, there was quiet in the air and the sound of the sand against your dry knuckles was remarkable. I listened as you warped that finger in and out, down through that multitude of crushed and infinitesimal fragments of things that once were, between the specks of abstraction.

And, you see, I knew then that I could love you more than you loved me. I don’t know why, but that’s when it was. That moment, your finger in a teapot full of sand, your children asleep, your words meaningless, your pulse at your throat contorting your profile, your treehouse around us and above us and below us, and the astringent taste of something familiar in my mouth – that moment. It was when I made the decision that swept me to where I am now. That moment was when I kissed you and you touched the side of my cheek with your finger sugared in sand, and the breath of you filled me up and emptied you. That moment. That was when I could have chosen no and I chose yes.

But this wasn’t supposed to be a story about love. They’re never supposed to be stories about love. What would I know?

Something else

‘What colour is silence?’ a woman asks the synaesthete.

A long pause.

‘I’ve never seen true silence,’ he finally says.

Later
The museum has absorbed all the synaesthetes and the nonaesthetes and the syn-curious into its skin like rain into an anonymous, quiet earth.

New York I love you, but you’re making me cringe

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By Luke Hortle

A while ago, I met a photographer from The New Yorker at the museum. I can’t remember his name because I was too busy swooning (he was European and painfully handsome in that rugged and forlorn manner that Europeans often are) and feeling inadequate, because we didn’t have a book with kangaroos in it. But this sensation of inadequacy (and it was a sensation, a bodily one; I could feel it drenching my limbs) leached beyond this one apparently minute interaction. Horror of horrors, I felt grateful to have met this man. Not because of his aquiline features, but because of all that other cultural currency that he’d brought with him, from Europe, from New York, and now he was talking to me, in Hobart, on this island, and I felt inferior, somehow ashamed, immodestly thrilled. Enter the cultural cringe.

At MONA FOMA last year, I went to see PJ Harvey. In a break between songs, clouded in the beer-breath and radiant bodily steam of PW1, Eleanor whispered to me that seeing PJ perform was ‘like a religious experience.’ I thought she was being overly dramatic and told her to finish her beer. This moment has been nagging me ever since, the implication being that we were somehow not quite worthy to be in the presence of this woman wreathed in feathered black. That we ought to have been grateful. This really pissed me off, because I wanted to be in thrall to PJ Harvey (did you know that ‘thrall’ comes from an Old English word for ‘slave’?) and not think about the experience in terms where I came off with an inferiority complex. Later that night at Faux Mo, I kept hearing people say things like ‘Are we still in Hobart?’ And I was guilty of thinking similar things. I couldn’t comfortably integrate where I was with what I was thinking. (What I can remember from Faux Mo: You’re in. Bass thumps skywards, leaching out of the winding alleyway; who even knew it was there? Bulging lights bloom in the brickwork. You manage to jump the line. Paris Wells is there. The really hot guy from BalletLab is there, sans feathers and twigs. You think that BalletLab was great, but so fucking weird. You should definitely be drinking gin. Bordello-red flickers against crumpled aluminium curtains. People are dancing like it’s windy.) The city, the island, kept intruding in my fantasies, fantasies which constantly gestured away from where I was, geographically, culturally, far-flung connections sketched with alcohol-induced similes.

PJ Harvey at MONA FOMA 2012. Photo credit: MONA/Remi Chauvin

PJ Harvey at MONA FOMA 2012. Photo credit: MOFO/Rémi Chauvin

I can’t seem to escape the fact that geography matters. It’s dished up to me on a daily basis. Customer after customer will find a way to tell me, as they purchase their catalogue, postcards, cunt soap, whatever, that ‘this [museum, art, estate, the whole deal] is a great thing for Tasmania.’

A brief interlude from that guy in the bookshop

‘Do the postcards come with envelopes?’
No. Of course they don’t; they’re fucking postcards. From Wiki: ‘A postcard or post card is a rectangular piece of thick paper or thin cardboard intended for writing and mailing without an envelope.’
‘Do you have a book on the architecture?’
No. We really don’t. I promise. And (shockingly, eye-poppingly shockingly, I know) you are not the first person to ask for one. And even if you do tell me for the next half an hour how great such a book would be, and how you can’t believe that there isn’t one for you to take home in your eager paws, I still won’t be able to provide one for you. So fuck off already.
‘Do you still sell the angina soaps?’
No words.

Invariably, their assessment of the museum becomes inextricable from its geographical locale. And inherent within these assessments of the museum is a commensurate assessment of Hobart and Tasmania more broadly; that we’re lucky to have the museum where it is, because of the entrenched view that the state is culturally inferior, a backwater, next stop Antarctica. And now I’ve just gone and written that and perpetuated the stereotype in print. Oh great. Maybe this doesn’t matter though, and maybe I’m just projecting my own (recently discovered) cultural cringe onto these social interactions. It (projecting potentially/completely incorrect assumptions onto a situation/conversation/relationship) does sound like something I would do.

I can’t seem to write about this cringe response without falling into the trap that the very construct tries to describe: ie. I end up cringing, through my attempts to elucidate what was happening when I met that photographer. (Clarification, obfuscation; potato, po-TAR-to.) My point: I live on an island, and sometimes this fact, and its corresponding sense of islandness, of being so bounded by a place, by a body, is suffocating.[i] Maybe this is my postcolonial penance. It’s undoubtedly constitutive too, which makes me uncomfortable (which is weird, because I’m an identity politics enthusiast). I’ve been told I can be quite neurotic (‘amazingly’ might’ve been the word used, actually) and maybe this is why I like reading The New Yorker. But I suspect it’s also a reaction to where I am, geographically and culturally; as I hand over my cash, I know I’m buying into a particular type of identity, a particular type of self-image. It’s a performance, one in which I’m friends with Lena Dunham and live in a loft with Paul Auster and/or Oliver Jeffers and/or Michael Cunningham. Even as it’s a performance, it’s one performed from my particular moment in time and space, my ‘here’ and my ‘now.’ But I’m not completely shallow; I do enjoy reading the magazine. I just want people to see me reading it as well.

Luke once ran over a Blue-tongued Lizard with a lawn mower. It was awful, like a scene out of a Tarantino film. He still feels queasy/guilty about it. Luke works in the Mona Bookshop.

[i] I recently read a couple of pieces from an edition of Island magazine, an essay by Adam Ouston and a short story by Ben Walter. They’re great, they really are. You should go read them, right now. What I do know is that they made me feel better about being a man living on an island.

Perfectly meaty

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‘We try for purity but still we’re glorious blobs of meat.’ Michael McClure

I really love this quote. I picked it up in a book about the Beat generation in the Mona Bookshop. It’s from a piece called ‘Love Me For the Fool I Am’. It illustrates our collective striving for a utopian ideal (of the body, of a society, of a sexual encounter) and contrasts it with the ridiculous and gross reality of our meaty forms. It’s a delicious idea, to think of human bodies as so many slabs and slices of flesh. That being said, I don’t enjoy zombie films. I find the cultural framework they utilise to fetishise the body intellectually titillating, but visually disgusting. In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, one character is talking about either making out or having sex as a young person (it’s ambiguous; it’s postmodern rooting). He says, ‘We were kids. It was too early in the cultural matrix for actual screwing’ (it’s on page 80, if you care). This is one of those perfectly drawn moments in the novel, and I think it’s very similar to the quote from McClure. There’s imperfection there, an inadequacy of experience determined by our own ability (or inability) to understand our own warped subjective moment in time.

Matrix, 1999, ©Jenny Saville/Licensed by Viscopy Copyright, 2012

Eye of Sauron, scene from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ film trilogy.

There’s lots of rape in the museum. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. I’m a guy, so maybe that’s a really awful thing to say (particularly after US Congressman Todd Akin’s recent and painfully insensitive remarks about ‘legitimate rape’). I’m also gay, although I’m not sure that’s important here or not. In the context of the museum, with its many artistic representations of sexual violation, I think rape extends its trajectory beyond any one and highly traumatic sexual event; we all become complicit with the ‘rapist’ (whomever that might be) in our position as viewer, as voyeur. The cultural matrix expands for us. We can look at things and our looking is condoned. The model in Jenny Saville’s Matrix lies back, sex bared in fleshy, meaty strokes (with undeniable similarities to the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings films – tell me you don’t see it) as our eyes rake the body spread on the canvas. Sidney Nolan’s Leda and the Swan paintings are beautiful depictions of horrific events; Nolan makes rape beautiful. But it’s an ambivalent and undecidable beauty, much like the myth of Leda and the Swan is both hauntingly archetypal and quietly violent. If anything, artistic representation runs the risk of paralysing sex within its own physicality. It can lock a body upon the wall, splayed, static and open for scrutiny, like a lepidopterist’s moth or a cadaver. Dead things. Silent. Bloodless. Think of Cunts and Other Conversations, with over a hundred vaginas ranged along a dark corridor like so many dinner plates, excised from any body, intelligence or human presence. I think it’s necessary to consider the politics of looking at images of bodies, sex and rape. If you don’t, you run the risk of becoming just plain fucking creepy. You end up just seeing the meat.

A while back I went to see Prometheus, the much awaited not-a-prequel-ok-it’s-kind-of-a-prequel follow up to the 1979 classic Alien. ‘It was so … what’s the word? Rapey,’ my friend Amy said afterwards. (Just to be clear, ‘rapey’ is not actually a word.) We sat in a restaurant on the waterfront, trying to finish our desserts whilst periodically pawing at our throats as we remembered particularly gruesome scenes from the film. The Alien films beg their audience to fixate on moments of violently hybridised human/alien sexual encounter. (Think of that iconic scene in Alien, when the alien first explodes out of John Hurt’s ribcage as a bloody, penile muppet in a kind of visually reversed penetration.) In Prometheus, a worm-like alien bites its way into one of the character’s spacesuits, before burrowing its way into the character’s mouth. His eyes roll back in his head as the audience in the cinema groans with disgusted pleasure.

Scene from ‘Alien’

Scene from ‘Prometheus’

It was a disgusting scene, but Amy and I were talking about it with a kind of horrified relish. This awful depiction of death by face-rape was somehow enjoyable, even titillating. I’m still not sure what to make of our reactions to the film. I know our viewing of this sexual violence is condoned (the Alien films are a staple of pop culture), but I can’t work out how to move beyond that initial reaction. A comment on masculine sexual anxiety and the male’s inherent fear of penetration? I’m not convinced. A deep-seated desire to watch violently sexual fantasies play out on the silver screen? Let’s hope not. Maybe it’s just too early in my cultural matrix for this kind of screwing.

-Luke Hortle

Luke thinks that he might be a writer, but wonders if the term might also be synonymous with ‘wanker’. He has recently discovered fennel, the New Yorker and Girls (the tv show). He works at the Mona Bookshop.

There’s a wolf in your head

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As children, my sister and I would go to stay the night at our grandparents’ house on Chapel Street, Glenorchy. I’m not sure how old we were and only have a hazy memory of the house itself. What I do remember of Chapel Street, and vividly, is what lay beneath the house. Whilst our parents were drinking coffee with Nanny Grace in the kitchen, Grandad would take Erin and I to venture under the house-proper, a terrifying place reached through an ancient wooden hatch-door. Erin and I would steel ourselves to take a few shuffling footsteps into the gloom, the air thick with the reek of cold bricks and bristling possums. These monster marsupials would freeze, staring us down with their glinting eyes, electrified marbles in the darkness.

Being taken to look at the possums under the house was a regular occurrence. The memory of these visits is like part of a story, one that I sometimes remember is true. (I also suspect that it has lead to my inability, as an adult, to be able to sit through any werewolf film; my childish impression of these possums is suspiciously lupine). The more I think about it, the more obvious it seems that fear, or terror, is an inescapable part of being a child (how else are we to pave the psychological foundations for the neuroses that emerge later in our lives, those behavioural and mental patterns that make us so attractive and repellent to other people?). Just read Treasure Island, a quintessential childhood novel, and note how much of the book Jim Hawkins spends in a state of paralysing terror. Proper fairytales, not that saccharine Disney tripe, are drenched in gore; ‘And they all lived happily ever after’ arguably means so much more when someone has escaped ending up dismembered in a bathtub full of blood and hacked limbs. The deep, dark woods of storytelling are not a very nice place. Everything is not going to be alright. Chances are the big bad wolf is going to fuck granny, suck her bones dry, screw the axeman and then sit around discussing morals with you over a hot cup of tea.

‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ my Grandad would say. Erin and I would be tucked up in bed in the spare room at Chapel Street. Scratchy sheets pulled tight to our chins. Grandad would begin his tale.

‘There was a Boy whose name was Jim;
His Friends were very good to him.
They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam,
And slices of delicious Ham …’

We would instantly be filled with terror, unable to move and equally unable to stop listening to the tale of Jim. (Like a visit under the house, we knew this awful poem very well). These opening lines paint a fairly innocuous picture, even a pleasant one. What a lucky boy that Jim is. His friends are so nice to him, even if they do display a slightly disconcerting penchant for feeding him. But, oh, what horror the latter lines of Hilaire Belloc’s poem hold. Shit gets real when Jim escapes Nursie’s hand whilst at the zoo. Alas, his freedom is short-lived when he runs straight into the jaws of Ponto, a rather hungry lion. (One has to wonder if Ponto had brokered a deal with those suspicious feeder-friends of Jim’s. ‘Feed him up,’ Ponto might’ve snarled over the phone. ‘Feed up the little porker then send him my way.’ Who knows; maybe Nursie was in on the deal too. Jim must’ve been a real little twat).

‘Now, just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels,
And then by gradual degrees,
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees,
Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.
No wonder Jim detested it!’

Mr. Belloc, just like my Grandad, seemed to relish these deliciously metred lines. We did not. Oh, the horror. (NB: Grandad’s recital of the poem was very much a performance piece, and a brilliant one, complete with requisite snarling). We were powerless before the hypnotic drawn out terror of this tale, a carefully measured concoction of words, tone and pace. Trapped within its iambic rhythm, Jim’s fate (and ours) would be sealed from the beginning as the lines galloped along. The story of Jim (which I have included below in full) has an important place within the mythology of our family. It is a common literary trauma embedded within us. Erin has also written about listening to ‘Jim’; for us, there’s something there that we need to revisit and deal with.

There is a piece in the museum called The Blind Leading the Blind, by Belgian artist Peter Buggenhout. It is a sculpture. One of the materials used to create it is household dust. It hangs from the ceiling, looming out of the shadows. It fills me with anxiety, with dread; my diaphragm tightens, the skin of my neck crawls and I dare not turn away from this twisted black mass. Is it part of the ceiling? No; it is a wolf. This art piece shocks me, and the shock is one of recognition.

The Blind Leading the Blind
Peter Buggenhout
Image courtesy of the Museum of Old and New Art

Most people, I think, are haunted by certain dreams. The brain is a bizarre bowl, and nightmares return to fill it with a weird and paralysing soup. I recognise the Buggenhout sculpture as a set-piece from a recurring nightmare I had as a child. I’m trapped amongst shifting piles of twisted metal. The piles grate together, slick with water and oil. Suddenly, I am sitting in a cinema watching a large count-down on the screen. The numbers tower, white and flickering. God’s voice booms, reading the numbers as they flash before me. And that’s it. It sounds relatively innocuous now that I read it back, but then again, the real terror of a dream doesn’t often lie in its literality or immediate appearance. Maybe it’s narcissistic for me to recognise a part of my own dream in The Blind Leading the Blind. It’s creepy too. It’s as if Buggenhout knows what is in my own skull.

- Luke Hortle

Luke works in the MONA Gift Shop, say ‘hello’ if you see him. This neurotic and talented lad aspires to be an editor, or writer, or PhD student, whichever comes first. He also has an overwhelming addiction to books. The Blog Mistress sometimes wonders if his eventual demise will be a result of being crushed under a teetering pile of tomes in a New York apartment. Fated to be a potential tale on a show such as A Life of Grime New York. A highly underrated show, frankly.

P.S. Here lies the story of Jim. Reader, beware; it does not end nicely.

Jim
By Hilarire Belloc

There was a Boy whose name was Jim;
His Friends were very good to him.
They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam,
And slices of delicious Ham,
And Chocolate with pink inside
And little Tricycles to ride,
And read him Stories through and through,
And even took him to the Zoo—
But there it was the dreadful Fate
Befell him, which I now relate.

You know—or at least you ought to know,
For I have often told you so—
That Children never are allowed
To leave their Nurses in a Crowd;
Now this was Jim’s especial Foible,
He ran away when he was able,
And on this inauspicious day
He slipped his hand and ran away!

He hadn’t gone a yard when—Bang!
With open Jaws, a lion sprang,
And hungrily began to eat
The Boy: beginning at his feet.
Now, just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels,
And then by gradual degrees,
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees,
Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.
No wonder Jim detested it!
No wonder that he shouted ‘Hi!’

The Honest Keeper heard his cry,
Though very fat he almost ran
To help the little gentleman.
‘Ponto!’ he ordered as he came
(For Ponto was the Lion’s name),
‘Ponto!’ he cried, with angry Frown,
‘Let go, Sir! Down, Sir! Put it down!’
The Lion made a sudden stop,
He let the Dainty Morsel drop,
And slunk reluctant to his Cage,
Snarling with Disappointed Rage.
But when he bent him over Jim,
The Honest Keeper’s Eyes were dim.
The Lion having reached his Head,
The Miserable Boy was dead!

When Nurse informed his Parents, they
Were more Concerned than I can say:—
His Mother, as She dried her eyes,
Said, ‘Well—it gives me no surprise,
He would not do as he was told!’
His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James’s miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

Five prejudiced affairs with Mona (or, Anica and Mona, sitting in a tree)

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1. The art of knowing whether you are flirting
or
The art of consuming modern art

You never know what to expect, when you first walk in. Something, nothing. Something that turns out to be nothing? Nothing that becomes something? But that’s part of it, it’s part of what you crave. The not-knowing, the possibility, the risk, the anticipation.

Or, you walk into it, always, knowing that you want something. Anticipating. Breath-held wonder and the greed for Meaning. For something Beyond. For Something.

Forgetting that you always bring something, too. Into that space filled with sound and furious signifiers. A look, a wink, a glance, a colour, an ellipsis of thought…

And sometimes it feels like there is a lot of empty space here. Whatever that means. It doesn’t mean space with nothing in it. It just means space where what’s in it isn’t something you know how to find. But that’s part of it too. And if you don’t crave that, then there’s no room for you to become anything else.

Every visit, every interaction has a memory of the last, and the last-but-one, and the very first, and all those between. And not just your own, but everyone else’s too. Whether that makes you feel good or not. You can never be independent of it. You don’t even have to listen carefully to hear it. There’s nothing new here, and nothing old either – everything exactly as you see it as you come to it at this moment: the wink, the shadows, the abstract moment, the ambiguous words.

You ignore what doesn’t speak to you. Dismissive. (And yet you still think you’re better than the girl beside you who snaps a photo, winks a wink, pretends to see something, sees nothing.) You sidestep around the arti/fact for a moment, you make it what you want it to be, you read it, you act on it, you understand it, you live by it, you love by it, you are – for those moments and their repercussive pre-dawn awakenings – defined by it, and it by you.

And then you turn a page, a corner, a blind eye, and you discover a new star (or disavow an old one – all your past loves are eventually Plutos).

I stop near the end, as always, to check that my heart is beating. As always, it’s not. As always, I pretend I don’t care.


Pulse Room, 2006
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Photo credit: MONA/Leigh Carmichael

 

 

 

 

 

2. Don’t touch

There’s water dripping through the walls here. I’ve never noticed before. I’ve read about it, in all those things that people write, but I’ve never seen it. That interests me. To know about a thing and to touch a thing are not the same at all. At all. Peter Carey, in the voice of Lucinda, once said as much. I bookmarked it – a real bookmark, subcutaneous in the skin of a book, not a click on a word that once meant something real. Before ‘bookmark’ was a verb in my vocabulary. When it was still a noun I could touch. I held that page, with my bookmark, and came back to it over and over. And over. I could still find the page, I think, just with the curve of spine from so many visits.

Lucinda’s knowledge was about sorrow – about suffering and conceiving of suffering. Mine is about something else. About seeing what you want instead of what’s there. At least I think it is.

(Well, wouldn’t you touch that wet wall?)

3. The idea of absence

This place is just filled with your voice – literally, literarily. It’s all you. I can’t imagine how it feels to experience this place without you. On my own, with anyone else.

I think I’ll visit here when you die, and I’ll forget what it means to die: it won’t make any sense because you will be here and everywhere and I won’t understand the idea of absence.

That’s assuming that you die first. And I don’t know why you would. Maybe I’ll die first. And if that’s what happens, then I’ll come here after I die. I’ll haunt your words and your presence here and then you won’t know what it’s like to be here without me.

4. The blind leading the blind (after Peter Buggenhout)

A great hulking thing hangs above me. I think maybe it’s art. Or maybe dread. Or maybe love. It is huge and blackish in the blackness, embarrassed by its own size. An apologetic, deformed monster trying desperately and writhingly to disappear backwards into cracks nonexistent: a mutant spider, an octopus, without the proper experience of its species, to disappear into cracks. For every limb it squeezes into one corner, two more vomit themselves out of another: messy, dripping, scrabbling for purchase on the surfaces, alive yet utterly inert. Grasping at the ceiling, ashamed of its own clumsy bulk, its corners are impotent and its curves broken. Its rusting creaking groaning strength is a kind of unkind joke against its ludicrous body. It is Kafka’s Gregor, horrified by its own existence. I am afraid to stand beneath it. It is some kind of nightmare – to itself?

And also I want nothing more than to be closer to it in the half-light, for it to somehow ingest me, excrete me, validate me.

5. Why shouldn’t we?

I finally manage to book in for one of Tattoo Tim’s tours of the Wim Delvoye exhibition – his third-last tour. He’s had a few days off, and he says he hasn’t been so nervous in a long time. He’s buzzing. He greets us all individually, welcomes us, tells us that he’s not here to explain the art, but just to tell us a story. His story is his way of giving us the gift of recognising what he calls the ‘beautiful absolute irrelevance of our existence’. And somehow I think I understand what he means.

He talks to us for seventy minutes, in between the pigskins and the sharp points of the laser-cut steel. He is funny, self-deprecating, self-important, performative, honest, naive, cynical, charismatic, entrancing, exploding with energy. I suppose he has a lot of time to come up with clever things to say, sitting for five hours a day on his plinth with his tattooed spine towards his audience, his eyes on his one small white speck in the middle of the black window shade. During the tour, we never once see the tattoo. But we see the impact of it on his life, on his experience of being in the world. And it’s bizarre and mundane all at once.

Everything he says to us is engaging. But at the end, in the dark room standing against the projected reality of Delvoye’s Art Farm, where the tattooed pigs grunt and shove and scratch and sleep, he gets to the part that hits me most. He orates a kind of fanatical frisson of absolute adoration for Mona, and that’s part of his story now too. He tells us, from the outside, that ‘everything has changed here in the last 14 months’ – this city isn’t the same one it was before. I could not be more convinced by his arguments.

At the end of Tim’s tour, I’m shaking. He’s articulated a passion for this place that I’ve heard around me since the museum opened. I hear it everywhere – in the museum, away from the museum, on airplanes, interstate, in supermarkets, everywhere. It’s an uncontainable and weird sense of ownership, pride, excitement, gratitude, wonderment. I feel it too, and I resent it. I hate feeling so sentimental and I don’t want to be one of the anonymous masses who somehow feel that since it has entered our lives, we now have some righteous connection to this place. Last year I went for the first time to MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Neue Gallerie, The Dali – so many wonderful American museums, but all the time I was holding this secret smugness that I live in the place where there is Mona. I couldn’t wait to come back and visit. It feels unsophisticated to experience so much joy about a place, especially this place. I am embarrassed by my passion for this place. But why shouldn’t we feel in love – what’s so incredibly wrong with being joyful?

Mona has done something to me that nothing in my life has ever done before. It’s connected me to people I don’t know and don’t ever want to meet. It’s torn a gash in the emotional, creative, psychological space/time continuum – a great fissure that allows glimpses into everything we dream of, and forget to dream of, beyond the everyday. The things we search for in love, in religion, in our unknown selves. Meaning, connection, extraordinary grief and extraordinary radiance, and – more vitally – things wholly intangible, but so deep that they lift us away from everything else.

I thank Tim; he hugs me. I walk away fast, because I need to find a dark space to be alone and cry my guts out, because I can’t remember the last time anything made me feel so alive.

When I come back outside into the air, the steady rain takes me by surprise. But I don’t remember, anyway, what kind of day it was when I went inside. It was a million years ago. As always, when I leave here, I’m new. Better. Taller. Hungrier. More alive. More certain. More uncertain.

That’s all.

-Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

Anica is a writer, editor and critic. She has an ellipsis tattoo and if you notice it and identify it correctly, she might fall in love with you. We don’t know how to pronounce her name.

Tim, 2006 – 2012 (ongoing), with various pigskins
Wim Delvoye
Photo Credit: MONA/Remi Chauvin