After I posted this status on Facebook the Greenwich Punk called me immediately. He wanted to know who was the object of my skills. I told him that I had been dating someone for a few weeks and needed to dump them in a sensitive way because of a lack of chemistry. “You didn’t think I’d wait for you?” I said.
“Well no, I just thought you might be planning to stab me…”
“With a knife?”
“With your wit.”
“Well you know, If 50% of the guys I date are dicks, I always have to date two guys at once,”
After that I remember chatting a bit about orgasms (no reason) and listening to some songs he was writing at the moment. He said that he appreciated the Facebook status as my clever way of getting him to call me (?), but he was planning to call me anyway. He said he had to go, so I asked him what the function of the call was. Was he only trying to get the scoop on my dumping, or did he want to meet up before I went to Berlin?
“Yes, let’s go see a show next weekend, there’s a show up by Richard Kern, he’s a photographer.”
“Ok, I’ll look that up, See you later.”
I did look the show up. It was at Cabinet, reviewed by a digital assistant at Dazed. It was shit.
The artist claimed it was an ethnography of drug use in suburban America. This was compatible with the Greenwich Punk’s enthusiasm for recreational drugs. Unfortunately the pretense of ethnography was merely a fake rationale for taking photographs of young white women standing in their underwear. The was no ‘conceptual’ reason for them to be wearing translucent lingerie. There were no middle aged men standing in their tighty whities with bottles of Viagra… or for that matter people of color.
The photographer’s true motives came through in the interview….He kept on referring to the subjects as ‘girls.’ I thought about him using this word in front of the journalist, a young woman trying to get a toe hold in the creative class by writing this article for Dazed. She would also be considered a ‘girl’ in his rhetoric. Was her skin crawling when she interviewed him? Did the patriarchal power dynamics embedded in this situation fly right past her? She might be extremely grateful for the opportunity to interview a “successful” artist.
I thought about some of the Greenwich Punk’s comments about my blog, “that people would be reading it for their own purposes.” He felt it was problematic for me to make work about my body and how it felt in the system…but it was commendable for this photographer to tell us about the bodies of others through an obviously tainted lens.
But I doubted that the Greenwich Punk told me about the show to piss me off… It was probably just something that he heard about in his immediate environment… it was ‘marketable,’ so in the rhetoric of advertising he immediately assumed it was ‘good.’ It would be an interesting conversation to have if we ever got to the show….maybe there actually was a middle aged man with Viagra.
Fifty Dates of Grey 