I started this project with the idea of creating a space for indulging in your most guilty and campy pleasures away from those who invalidate and belittle them, which would be called The Bottom. The name came to me after watching a tv show about the deep ocean. To me, this geographic location represented the place you go in your mind after hitting a low of insecurity and worthlessness, where nothing matters. Politics and inhibitions fade into a distant abstraction, and the pain buckles into something poised, something stoic.
The creatures that exist there remind me of club kids and trans women and genderqueers pushing fashion into an uncomfortable place, using facetune to disfigure their bodies into something unrecognizable, embracing the inhuman and the artificial and the repulsive. I felt this unhinged and uninhibited kinkiness echoed in the isolated landscape of the deep sea, and the seafloor in general. Muclaginous invertebrates, tubular organisms, tentacles and secretions and cucumbers unfurling and tossing in the substrate, undulating, intermingling. The seabed is an unsophisticated place, sessile, destined to be trampled on.
The Bottom is of course an innuendo: it not only refers to a spatially inferior place, but adopts the discomfort and sleaziness of the homoerotic sex position. I am not interesting in making an argument about bottoming or sodomy, and I’m more-so using the phrase and the concept to establish the piece as something queer, dirty, uninterested in keeping up appearances. The name of the piece is tied to how it will be exhibited: on the floor. The ground is for trash, dirt, the common, the worthless, the un-esteemed. Sitting on the floor is a childish, humble, casual act. Formality exists to uphold the power of institutions (I probably need to flesh this out more--formality is required in places of money and influence). Etiquette is a disruption of the natural self.
Art goes on the walls. People laugh and interpret and hold their hand to their mouths and say “ahhhhh.” Art on the floor is different. The chin must angle down.
Rugs exist in this inferior space. They touch dust and dirt. Rugs are sandwiched between the ground and those that tread on them. They lay flat and vulnerable. They are predominantly associated with the feet, one of the more uncouth parts of the human body. They are soft and warm, and exist to make the ground a more inviting and pleasing space. A rug should be intermittently shaken to relieve it of the debris that has collected in its fibers. I also appreciate the shag carpet or rug as a hairy object. A rug can be untrimmed, scruffy, pubic. It can bear an uncomfortable resemblance to anatomy. Being untrimmed is a statement – severely for trans women, especially for cis women, slightly for gay men. It is an acceptance of the self. For many of us, body hairs are sites saturated with shame. After so long living with that unsustainable shame, the razor breeding razor bumps, sinking lower, it buckled into something vindictive. The cause of my own sense of inferiority became something I wanted to defend and pride.
There’s a lot of gross masculine ideals at the heart of the gay male leather scene, but as a person not in this group, I have my own idealized vision of it: an acceptance of body hair not as hyper-masculine but as hedonistic, uninhibited, unrefined. I conveniently gloss over the muscle worship. Pig sex is a fetish associated with leather that involves body hair and poppers and an interest in bodily fluids and sex toys. It’s an approach to sex that pushes the limits of the body and the superego.
It’s about sending yourself down until you’re in a place of clarity. The jewel thrown overboard sinks and sinks until it comes to a resting place in a calm clearing of sand and dusk.
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
vaporwave
blakekathryn
