love letters

                                   

Dearest,

I still have terrible nightmares of death and wake just before dawn with the bedclothes drenched and me, shivering and lucid, calling your name. The grim reaper of these dreams still resembles Pedro, but when he was much younger. It was so long ago... so its strange that Pedro should still haunt me.

                                                              
                                                              "L'Art c'est mon cul (Art is my ass) " Ben Vautier, 1965

                                                             "Kill Bill Vol.2" Still, Quentin Tarantino,2004


It was that same summer I met your brother and sisters, outside the church for your mothers funeral.

 "The Fading Culture of Ranching" Fernando Souto, 2007. "The recent availability of local pastoral jobs has instigated a resurgence of aboriginal stockmen, who look after livestock, around Hodgers River Dam. Roger Roberts, 56, is a contracted stockmen for a newly developed station that is owned by the aboriginal community. Hodger River Dam, near Mataranka, Northern Terriotory, Aust,2007"


I remember meeting your father too, and how his hands, knotted and gnarled and silvery with rings of skulls, reminded me of walnuts. I knew they had fashioned many of the finest guns in the region and complimented him on my own fine pistol you had got him to make. It lies up the hall in the bureau draw but I have not used it for a very long time.

                                     "Keith Richard's hands" Mario Sorrenti, 2010

That day you'd also brought me wild cactus flowers and I gazed upon their brutal beauty with some astonishment. I wore them in my hair that same evening as we listened to the mournful dirges your mother so liked. Later I found a spike had lodged itself behind my ear, a perfect streak of blood ran down my neck

                       "L'Art est inutile/ Pas d'art a bas l'art (Art is useless / No art down with art)  Ben Vautier, 1968.
                       
                                You said "it became me" and told me how as a boy you ate them.

Aalicia Magda Elmahdy,a 20 year old Egyptian woman and self described "secular liberal feminist" posted two nude photos of herself on her blog "A Rebels Diary" and has caused "controversy" within Egypt and internationally this week (November 2011). 

I will always savour this memory

The dawn is breaking and soon I will feel comfort from the day. I hope these letters are reaching you my love. I pray everyday for your swift return

Until then here are my kisses xx

Ms&Mr/ Stephanie& Richard nova Milne (can't find date/title for this work so if you know let me know)

Oh dear this post seems to have been hacked by a some crazy old fashioney lady.

Anyway Im back now! and thinking about what a strange little time its been lately. I've been pottering around and being a bit useless really but as I just said, I'm back and we're still going to talk about love and letters but first.. hmm whats been happening...

The Vuluptuous Horror of Karen Black/ Kembra Pfahler, 2010

well there was Halloween..which is kinda dumb and everyone always looks a bit white trash in their costumes and its some weird pagan tradition that seems to have been hijacked by the States but i really like it..for obvious macabre reasons.

And lewd ones too. This was one of the lewd and kinda poetic things on the wall before my friend Danielle and I painted a mural over it.

the theme given to us was "Mexican"..and this part read Juancito Sela Come..but then we painted over as it was deemed too offensive...sigh.. Its Argentinean slang that another friend Miriam gave me which loosely translates as the little man eats it..or sucks cock i guess. 

As a team we channeled the spirits of Frida and Diego. I was Diego as I have these really great overalls (old American brand) which makes me look like a socialist muralist and also quite a bit fatter (no picture included I'm afraid). But here are the lovely couple themselves

"Frida and Diego Rivera", Frida Kahlo, 1931

This is one of those foot shots that people always seem to take..but I'm including it as whenever I'm in the bath i look at me feet and think of Frida Kahlo's "What the Water Gave me"..it happens nearly every bath.

I'm ending with Sophie Calle as I hope it ties up some of the "themes" I've been awkwardly and maybe subliminally expressing (precluding the strange Mexican one) which has something to do with art as language and the death of the author/ artist but through games and musings on love and desperation and duplicity. The picture below is from her book which itself was a response to Paul Austers novel "Leviathon" in which Calle served as his muse for the artist character, Maria Turner. In her book she enacts the characters actions described by Auster, creating a humorous and playful inversion and "doubling". 

Sophie Calle "Double Game" 2007

Her other works have included following a stranger (Henri B) around Paris and recording his daily activities, becoming a chambermaid in a hotel so she could look and photograph peoples possessions, "Douleur Exquise" in which after being dumped she got different people to write their own worst experience with her own accompanying text, until through time, her own recollection and accounts became shorter and less painful and form a quite moving collection of letters. Probably the most well known work is "Take Care of Yourself" which was entitled from the parting remark in an email sent by another lover breaking up with her and which she subsequently got analysed by 107 women from varying professions. It was also performed, psychoanalysed... even puppets became involved. 

But the most beguiling is this picture above...again a double take.. but lovely all the same. 

That's all for now...my head is too full of imagined and half true conversations and words and language and old loves and taxidermy.

But I hope these letters are reaching you my love....