A dog bites a man, and there is no story about it. A man bites a dog, and there are a hundred phone screens to record it. This could summarize what Erika felt when we were watching La Ribot’s Another Distinguée. People are so conditioned to move closer to a surprising or titillating thing to be able to capture it on their phones, and likewise the audience was goaded to close down on the two bodies cutting pieces off of each other, not letting others to watch by simply forming a big circle. I hear her, and I agree that this is our recently-acquired form of social choreography. But I also felt that this desire to get close (to see better as if they were looking at it with the mediation of a screen) is the expression of a shared need for intimacy.
This is the beginning of the evening; we first see the colossal “Sonia”–a giant installation covered by a black plastic–under dim, angular white light, standing tall and sexy like the negative image of a glacier mountain. This chase between two bodies is the second negative image, equally sexy and dark and inverted. They are covered with skin-colored transparent tights, and taking turns to rip and cut pieces off of the layers. There is some sense of animosity, but it is also an expression of desire. One runs towards a thick group of audience members, then kneels and raises his or her hip suggestively. The other comes rushing in, gets so close that their entangled and faceless bodies create the image of a monstrous, multilimbed, animate blob. One hand moves fast to cut a layer, the other hand pulls the piece forcefully, yet another hand holds on to the leg of an audience member to keep balance. I hear a guy voicing his admiration in a French-inflected “sexy!”, his girlfriend approves in a similar mutter, as if this exchange necessarily revealed something. Is it our hungry way of watching and closing down on it that makes this scene so obscene? Maybe that’s why Maria loves how people rush in around them and obstruct each other’s view in the process.
But I had another revelation. In our first morning, we saw Francis Bacon exhibit at Centre Pompidou. [They made a thing about the texts that inspired him for some of his triptychs, but it completely eluded us. The installation of the images and the plates was also quite confusing.] The biggest take away was his Studies from the Body, which I hadn’t seen before. Hours later, as I was watching the translucent skin being ripped from the desirous flesh by the sense of fleeting time and reality (or by the photographic force, if I also throw the iconic poster of Antonioni’s Blow-Up into the mix) I couldn’t unsee the similarities. Not only the colors or shapes, but what motivates or animates this disfiguration of human form felt the same.
(Caption’sız bilgisiz bambambam)
And then:
“Dark practices” in (what Maria beautifully coined as) “devorations”
With my witch friend Erika, Paris was between Bacon and Another Distinguée, walking in cold weather and inside catacombs, sailing in the dark and finding occult bookshops, all the while devouring great food and wine. Somehow all of these actions mean the same thing, and it was what I was starving for. I let go of some dead weight, apparently six months is all you need to shed skin.
Which makes sense. All through the seven hours of flying all I could think of was to fill the bathtub and lie in it like some bug who just left the chrysalis. This is something Audrey taught me in our Brussels home (Audrey, my teacher in Taurian pleasures of being alive).
I can’t believe this was just a week ago. The insane pace here sends it light years further in the blink of an eye. I already had a depressive meltdown and extreme anxiety about not being able to write (which still continues, and this blog post is proof). Yesterday, hangover guilt-tripping and wet from the rain, I was walking up from the Herald Sq subway station on my way to the library. I first felt the vibrations, then heard the music. This band really shook the sadness and paralysis of the week off of me. The subway station became a jungle:
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