I Wanna Be Adorned

This is part of my latest inkjob, which starts getting coloured next Wednesday. Best mate of mine asked if the background was going to be coloured too, or whether you would be able to see my flesh behind the image. It had never occurred to me to colour the background, and the idea of it really irked me for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Then I realised that it was because I like the option to be unclothed sometimes. I am heavily adorned-- scars, tatts, piercings-- but to me they are jewellery more than clothing. An adornment rather than a covering.

My overall vision, how I imagine I would like my body to look, indeed, how it already looks I suppose, is like an old building (a temple and all *rolls eyes*). Bits of it damaged, cracked or missing altogether, worn smooth by the elements, dust collecting in the corners and crevices, random graffitti in places, the odd sparkle of stained glass and gilt...

Hooked On Bakery

I leave Perth for ONE MINUTE and look what they get up to! Oh well... better find me some hook action in Sydney to make up for this! Any offers??

Excess Art

To make oneself into a work of art is in a sense the only response to an imminent and ridiculous redundancy of the specific forms of the body; and to make oneself into a work of art (as Nietzsche and, following him, Michel Foucault suggest) is not to simply aestheticize life, to dandify it, or to make oneself into an object or spectacle for the artistic investigation of others. It requires living one's life and one's body in excess of what is required-- in excess of discipline and even in excess of aesthetics.
To live one's life as a work of art is, among other things, to once again return to one's body as the site and source, the origin of pleasure and productivity and to utilize it differently, to move and act in ways other than those that have habitually confined us. Acting differently also leads to being acted on differently-- to sense differently, developing each sense beyond its usual biological reach and inquiring into the limits and transformability of biology itself. Developing alternatives-- synesthetically cross-mapping the senses onto each other, sensing differently, using the senses in terms of the range and scope of the other senses, exploring how each sense functions or is capable of functioning quite differently from its assumed and normalized role. To develop these alternatives is inherently invested in artistic activity. It is to render the body differently in representation, for representation is, as I have argued, almost a second skin, a diaphanous sheathing for bodies that transforms what the body is and does. It is looking good in both senses-- looking at something well (outside the domain or order of the gaze) and being looked at, as well.

-- Elizabeth Grosz, Naked (2006: 200)

Hanging On

It is often as though the skin were dramatising the primary significance of the word 'bear'. In much sadomasochistic practice and imagery, there is an obsessive interplay between the attack on shape carried out through the use of weights, or objects hung from the skin in order to distress and distort its contours, and the display of the skin's reassuring capacity to support weight. The skin bears weight as its owner bears suffering. In one ritual practiced by masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan, a third meaning was enacted: he hung plastic babies from hooks in his skin, as a way of demonstrating the enforced bearing of children (1993: 61). Hanging objects from one's skin seems to reduce one's skin to an object, merely fleshly stuff to be played with at will and without mercy. But to hang yourself from your skin, or, as we might say, in a small but prepositional shift, by your skin, as practised, for example, by the self-modifying performance artist Stelarc, who hung himself high in the air through hooks in his skin, is to reduce yourself to the condition of object, or mere mass or weight. The hung person is of course reduced to an object, a mere carcass. They are wholly vulnerable and available. But they are also supported, borne up by the mortification they elect to have to bear. Suspension gives a curious compensatory sense of protection. Language gives us another literalisation here; of the person in the appalling condition, it must be said that they literally depend on their own skin.

— Steven Connor, ‘Mortification’ (2001: 44)

Flesh and Bone

Rebecca Schneider: 'In the archive, flesh is given to be that which slips away. Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh' (in Blocker, What the Body Cost, p 106)

Fluid Meanings

For future exploration, and any comment you might wish to add:

At the conference today a woman gave a paper partly concerning the practice of suppressing menstruation through contraceptive usage. Which I do, with my handy little Implanon implant, 'cos frankly I HATE HAVING PERIODS which make me crampy and sad and bloated and weak as piss for one week out of four. Then somehow I started to conisder this suppressing of my 'most womanly' of activities in terms of gender identity, and being 'post-female', and body modification and such as the question time progressed, and was about to mention that I was one of these folk they discussed ('but what type of women are they? who would do such a thing? *giggle*') when it occurred to me that I also induce lactation, the other 'ultimately feminine' act, and that this has a lot to do with the same issues I suspect. Then I thought about how I actually enjoy bleeding and court it in certain contexts, and then, well, I really couldn't find a way to express it all in such a forum...

Then again, sometimes stuff is just gross, period, and my desire not to have blood pouring out of my bits at often inconvenient times and accompanied my many uncomfortable if not downright disagreeable sensations may have less to do with the patriarchy than the fact that it just plain SUCKS, and being all self-affirming regarding my femininity and bleeding on a pot plant is not going to make it any more pleasant or desirable to me.

Curdle- Beatie's Blog

Someone has written a blog post about CURDLE, a certain Beatie of recent acquaintance, and you can find it right here. I've added my two cents worth in the comments too, 'cos I'm like that! Overall a fabulous review methinks.

Electronic Tatoo Display Runs On Blood

And another amazing link I just found in my inbox, this time from the deliciously geeky Harp Elf:

'Jim Mielke's wireless blood-fueled display is a true merging of technology and body art. At the recent Greener Gadgets Design Competition, the engineer demonstrated a subcutaneously implanted touch-screen that operates as a cell phone display, with the potential for 3G video calls that are visible just underneath the skin'

As you do. Wow.

Inky Cravings

Magnificent tattoos from the magnificent Xed can be found here. I'm am utterly ravenous for ink!