anyone i hang around with of late will have noticed i’ve been having this somewhat overbearing ninja talk, spurred by my binge watching kung fu epics and bootlegs for the better of a few months. to comments regarding discipline or strength on my part i coolly retort : “i’m just trying to be a ninja” - and pat my own back. i of course had to watch the 36th chamber of shaolin - and it clearly did me in; any skill, goal, aim, difficulty i started relating to one of the chambers. ok, i do know that kung fu masters are traditionally shaolin buddhist monks in china and that women were obviously not admitted to the teachings but since the times of canton and the tartars there was charlie’s angels and kill bill and plenty of sexy strong female leads so all is for the better in the best of worlds - reason enough to compare my life and what i do to the 36th chamber, so bear with me.

the same i do with movies, i do with music, objects, skills: i hoard. yes i admit it plainly i’m a hoarder and i accumulate seemingly endlessly. i collect things, knowledge, images. and like the aspiring ninja i go from chamber to chamber, without really knowing what’s coming at me, or what exactly i’m aiming for. all i know is i’ve got to get there, and even that is a rather new revelation. i’ve been really unsure at times, and went through phases, obsessively and less so, through degrees, through years - architecture, clothes making, precision stone cutting, music, dj-ing. and looking a great deal, absorbing.

my sister has become a mother and i’ve been fascinated with her child’s way of looking intensely then meticulously repeating what she had just seen me doing, knowledge pouring in and back out at an impressive rate. isn’t that the most beautiful of things? looking at the world and shoving it into your mouth. anyway more than copying it seems to me akin to seducing, seeking a response, seeking pleasure. growing up that pleasure seeking loses its naiveté and all of a sudden it’s all just so wrong - for women that is. this fucker once called me a copycat and a seducer (i sincerely wish you burn down in hell, plus i’ll tell you) - i love seduction, love the eroticising character of so many practices i hold dear - i’m thinking nancy grossman’s heads and their zipped up openings, the arousing power of jessi reaves assembled sculptures, of ser serpas’, the way objects collapse into one another, the way they are tightly twisted, stuffed, wrapped, suffocating under leather, plastic. the careful assemblage of jasmine gregory, parts lazily dangling, pipilotti rist’s cover of isaak, her acting cute and breaking cars with a flower, morag keil’s baby’s being born out of a computer screen. and the og’s, genzken’s dripping saynètes, countless winks to dicaprio (make yourself pretty!), rosemarie trockel’s desire line (the justine/juliette label in reference to Sade).

i got a sarah lucas book out, the librarian had a disgusted look on her face - “it’s gross, no? this makes me uncomfortable.” she turned the book around in her hand, showing me the cover. a plucked chicken, head down through a low cabinet’s drawer, a lit neon shoved up its ass. i guess that is somehow revolting, but i told her i thought it was sort of sexy - the violence of it, objects painfully penetrating each other. 

only now am i able to say what i’m after, or if not precisely, at least how i’m after it. i’m after recollections, and i collect and recompose to try and thinly recreate a sticky feeling, jolted by a weird setup of objects in the street, a line in a poem, a scene from a movie, a part in a song. i’m moved by intensity and contradiction, by tension and contagion - and seeping through all that, desire, seduction. desire in the form of discarding the old for the new, desire for cleanliness order and purity, desire for destruction, desire to control, to be controlled, to evade control and authority. i break down and accumulate; poems (“I am too pure for you or anyone”) (“I am your opus, / I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby” ) (“i have / no desire to know / where this, anything / is taking me”) (“for while I sleep / at bones the slathered pillowcase / my greasy habit hell be silent / for the salt. one drip, two / for wet spots on the nice wall / my shake is quiet, the wound sound I / have no hate I have no hate / sugar with an angel's zeromouth I wish / to question vertebrae til they puke /their secret ice”) (“today my heads are three”) (“The tongues of hell / Are dull, dull as the triple // Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus / Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable / Of licking clean // The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.”), snapshots of mangas exchanging spit trail kisses, of faceless women, of dancing flowers, apparently childish, sweet or clueless, parts of songs, sometimes just a sample, almost like a glitch, only to be reassembled with other parts, other glitches. i want to disturb my own order of things. i want to disturb the decorum i was taught, disturb the language (“I’m playing with the devil’s cock / it’s like a crayon / it’s like a fat burnt crayon / I’m writing a poem with it”), disturb the protocol. i want to find a way to say fuck off with objects and a smile on my face. and how the hell do you give shape to the heady, erotic power of words, of sounds, of smells (i was called a crazy sniffer by a perfume shop owner ), their corrosiveness, their softness, with shapes? that’s me looking at the 36th chamber. except i doubt there’s just one way, and that thought gives me a headache, like looking into the infinity of the universe. i’ve chosen one door and have gone through it. a way of making sense : collecting, breaking melting repurposing, reassembling, giving new shapes, new meanings, putting parts in opposition and seeking tension. penetrating, sarah lucas style. what i hoard is mainly trash, and melting them back into sculpture i feel i am relieving myself of the weight of these objects (maggie nelson speaks greatly of this in the art of cruelty). there’s some order in my chaos, groups, categories. an era maybe? i guess i’m nostalgic of my youth but aren’t we all, or the aura of the 90s and its modern cheap-ass objects, the last dripping hours of a time when our parents still behaved like the wells of wealth were bottomless. compulsive accumulation, capitalism, the modern home, the family, all that. i don’t look for anything in particular, or only rarely. i pick up given / abandoned / discarded objects with my own invented though so real intention, lending them meaning. a broken tv sat on a ripped fake leather sofa, tons of broken clothes rack, flower doorknobs, fancy wooden furniture, lampshades (how many! the homeliest of all) toys i wouldn’t dare show a child (a doll with a heart-shaped vagina hole?), broken air cons, stools with a cold, erotic feeling to them, thinking: how many crotches have rubbed against those seats?