Proximity to Power (Part 2)

Fictionalize (and fantasize)

I’ve always liked writing for specific people and contexts: creating a submission for a zine, a text for an art show, or a friend’s project. It’s not so much collaboration as inspiration, and my early writing work was driven by the certainty that it would be read by particular individuals or groups of people. Being part of a loose cohort of young artists in NYC in the late aughts and early 2010s (there is always a loose cohort of young artists in NYC at any given time) offered opportunities to present a number of experimental writing projects. 

Although I’d recently graduated from art school and had the option and ability to create visual artworks if I wanted, I liked making written work designed for galleries instead: it functioned differently than the artworks in the space, and my own presence could be nearly invisible when my writing was formatted as a press release or exhibition text. I enjoyed the idea of injecting my essence into something functional and semi-hidden, of subtly influencing the proceedings beneath surface perceptions.

One of the first pieces I showed in New York was was “Tudes,” which took the form of a performance at the now-defunct (a prefix that applies to most spaces of this era) Cleopatra’s in Greenpoint, a space run for ten years by four young art professionals during their off hours from jobs at larger galleries. A portmanteau of “attitude” and “dudes” (lol), “Tudes” was a series of short vignettes told from the perspective of several male competitive snowboarders residing in Whistler, Canada. 

I wanted to fictionalize (and fantasize) some of my own experiences as a former ski racer who grew up training in the area, as well as my teenage years as an extroverted partier, and express that via characters who couldn’t be mistaken for me. As someone who was married to a guy at the time, I was also interested in exploring the “mystique” of the fuckboy (although the term didn’t exist in my vocabulary back then), as well as aligning aesthetically with cis masculinity as a source of “freedom” and authority (much more on this later). 

“Tudes” was read at Cleopatra’s by a male actor, in keeping with my aim of disappearing myself from the text. What prompted this study in masculinity? I could point to my relationship with my athletic, white collar father, who played the role of ski racing stage dad in my young life and embodied an extremely traditional ideal of the masculine authority figure.

A more minor source of inspiration would be the ski team crushes I had, although they were largely on girls, which I documented in my diary late at night while staying at my grandparents’ house on weekends during training season. Perhaps the homosocial-with-erotic-tension atmosphere of “Tudes,” written more than a decade ago, was an exploration of this gay energy displaced onto subjects of a different gender. 

Why am I now reflecting on this project, the video documentation of which seems to have finally been washed from the internet by the sands of digital time after 12 years? It’s one of countless entry points into a topic that looms over so much of my history, both personal and artistic: my former life aligning myself with cishet norms of gender and sexuality, as well as to a culture of white supremacy and capitalism in general. I’ve spent the past five years slowly unpacking how that transpired for me in terms of sexuality and relationships, but I feel like I’m just now beginning to scratch the surface of how shifting away from that alignment impacts my career and artistic identity.

More on that next time. Until then, thanks for reading.