Thought of it

I’m not sure how long I was making work about ---------- for- I think maybe just over a year, which isn’t very long but in the hothouse of an Art University becomes an eternity, or, as one of my tutors put it “a bit tedious”. I don’t think I can recount all my interactions with ----, mostly because it is a bit tedious. But when I began making work about ----------; which was really about me, it blew my mind that I could just make work about myself and boys I fancied. The main effect that I successfully produced was that conversations with tutors and college staff became about texts from boys, drunken behaviour and my infatuation. “Boy and vagina talk” is how one male student characterised my lengthy discussions in an aggressive online outburst. Conversely, interactions with ---- became philosophically loaded, and had an academic distance from my personal desires or needs. Simply; it allowed me to excuse desperate attempts as performative actions.

I met ---------- at a music festival in West Clare where I’m from and where he was singing and playing. He was from Dublin living about 5 minutes away from my student house where I’d just put down a deposit. This resemblance of fate led me to develop an unhealthy infatuation. I thought about him constantly after our meeting (Summer 2015). It wasn’t until 2016, the second half of my second year, that I began to make work about my romantic engagements. I inevitably started to focus solely on ----, even though we’d had little contact since.

I think the littleness of this contact was precisely why it was so easy to aestheticise, it bore some resemblance to the sleek and refined displays of art I found online and in galleries. Succinct texts or a midnight encounter that required the six months of absence to fully unravel. I wrote in stark, crime report-like sentences like the descriptions of happenings and performances I’d stumbled upon. Some of the aspects of our relationship/non-relationship just had to be documented. For instance, he worked on a Disney Fantasy Cruise Liner for a Summer, which I felt required artistic elaborations. It became sort of exhausting/pathetic/compulsive to remember how long he stayed on the phone or the length of time between each sporadic 2am text. I became delusional about how important the work was. I had intense discussions with friends about the boundaries between art and life, authenticity and the ethicality of using or exposing a subject. A close friend of mine paused, and half-suggested that perhaps I didn’t have to fully commit to considering these weighty topics when dealing with this particular matter. Implying, gently, that what I was dealing with might not be very good art. I hadn’t thought about if it was good or not, or to be strategic about how much mental discomfort I was self-inflicting.

The art culminated in a sort of rock-bottom. I had found out ---------- would be playing in a bar in Dublin. I went there with friends. He spotted me and came over to talk about a contract I had sent him, he told me he had lost it. We were sort of flirting. My friends and I moved on but I returned later and very drunk, we ended up getting a taxi together and fighting. When we returned to his home we got into a bigger fight as far as I can remember. I refused to leave, I told him my real name wasn’t my real name and took his bed for the night. In the morning I was embarrassed. I waited in his bed for him to return. Then I realised I looked a bit desperate at this point. I decided to document what I was now considering a performance by stealing some of his possessions and suggested he retrieved them at an exhibition in a note I left on his bed. I had a academic-led, commodity-rooted theory as to why this was a significant artistic response. I forget it now. I think I just wanted to see him again. I took some things ; a tax information form, a passport, a knife, a toothbrush, Edith Piaf CD collection, and a razor. The next day I realised I would have to return his stuff, and I did a couple days later (after photographing the objects and holding a brief retrospective of the ---------- works) to his mother’s house.

Shortly after this, a Lecturer in College asked me what I made and did. I told him about the incident where I stole ----’s things. He thought it was funny. I told him that it wasn’t good. He said that he thought a bit of mischievousness for the sake of art was alright (or something). He asked me if I wanted to be an Artist or a good person. Last month I had a dream about him where he was leading a seminar I was in. We had to divide into pairs and each take a pair of large fake breasts and talk in “ditz”. According to this lecturer’s dream self, this was a important critical language in art which we had to become well-versed in. I don’t mean this to reflect on this real person’s character; but at the least it can inform you of my perception of him. Recently he spoke to a friend about me (I forget if it was before or after the dream) he said: “I didn't really get it or I wasn't sure what she was about but then I realised she was extremely intelligent, thoroughly engaged with the material and really spot on” (my friend’s words.) This kind of baffled me, I had attempted to send him a contract, actually, an identical copy of the one I sent ----------. I felt he had reacted quite badly to me slipping this innocuous document under his office door, so his belated validation of my intellect came as a bit of a surprise.

The other belated (sort of) validation came as more of a surprise and I suppose is the main reason for reflecting on this work (again). ---------- sent me a few messages a month ago, almost 2 years after the stealing incident. To paraphrase he told me that on reflection and with a bit of distance that night was kind of funny, and that he wanted to see my work which he incorrectly characterised as paintings. My honest reaction was that I felt a kind of loss, not only because ---- thought I still made paintings. I had always dominated the narrative with my desperate girl antics. Through his attempt at reconnection he revealed that he did encourage or partly admire my behaviour. This didn’t feel too good, which must lead me to admit, I have a certain misplaced pride in taking full responsibility for our relationship/non-relationship. He destroyed my image of him as somewhat above me, eradicating my role as the saboteur, and replacing it with something else. Something like a participant.

Something like a participant opens up new sets of possibilities I’m not entirely comfortable with. Like one of my friends said; I’d always made it out to be one-sided. Participation suggests something closer to a couple. Might I be engaged in a kind of transaction? Perhaps I am being unwittingly used? This is how I felt, I think, when I was talking to that academic. I was funny, maybe I was a bit like one of the students in his dream class.