I wrote this piece and read it at a fundraiser for the Residency at Papillon Farms . The event was an exciting collection of beautiful minds and I was honored to be included. Also it was on my birthday (Aug 03). After I read the following piece I sat back down in my seat and my stomach felt weird and that was the start of a long journey that resulted in two weeks in the hospital and me now writing this from a hotel where I’m doing a convalescence based artists residency and still mostly in bed.
So I am writing an update to this piece, to include the relevant experiences I’ve had since writing it, but I wanted to post the un-edited original first. Its a cool artifact of the day and time and a day and time that feels far away and different now.
I’m taking the paywall off for this and the next one, enjoy :)
70 years ago cervical cells were taken illegally and without permission from Henrietta Lacks before she died from cervical cancer. These cells became the first cells to be reproduced in a lab and contributed directly to basically every important development in medicine and billions of dollars for the medical industry. Two days ago her descendants settled with a biotech company for an undisclosed amount of money in an effort to be compensated for that incalculable contribution to modern medicine and human welfare
I’ve been thinking a lot about body fame.
I’ve been thinking about how taking communion has something in common with buying Marilyn Monroe’s lipstick tissue off of eBay.
And how we love to know what our birthdays mean about us and how we love to know the betting spread of the score that our body keeps.
I’ve always thought of MyChart and Find My Friends as my two favorite social media apps. One is about finding my body, and one is about finding any of the 20+ bodies I hold near and dear.
I love to browse MyChart. I have a lot of test results I can read, and imaging results I can scan, and the interface is easy and it lets you look at your MRI’s in slices.
When I look at it I feel like I’m reading a gossip blind item about a celebrity, and the celebrity is me.
I, like most people, am enticed by fame.
And I, like most people at this point, am a little famous, or my body is.
I have a de novo mutation in my COl3A1 gene and it makes me very sick and very special. My DNA has a tracker number and it is studied in medical schools all over the world. I’ve looked up from a hospital bed in the wee hours of morning rounds to see a gaggle of medical students gazing down ag me like I won an Oscar.
My body is famous, completely divorced from my precious little personality I’ve worked so very hard on over the years. And I very well may never be as famous as my body, who will be remembered after I’m gone and it has nothing to do with my thoughts or feelings or studio practice.
I went to the museum today and it was also full of famous bodies
There are five types of famous bodies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they are in order of least to most personal (meaning containing personality) as follows:
First there are the implied bodies, that aren’t even bodies at all. The bodies that would go inside of the armor or sarcophagus, or the bodies who would sleep in the tiny towering beds, the sounds you imagine when they land after hopping out of bed or the bodies you imagine squatting over the ornate chamber pots. The stand out body of these non-bodies to me is the tiny knight. A suit of armor original thought to be for a tiny knight like a Tolkien gnome that is now generally accepted to be instead for a child.
The second type is the Classical Ideal, monumental contraposto bare breasted elongated gods and goddesses and the bodies based on them for century’s after, rippling muscles effortless vascularity on the men and boneless languidity for the women. Attilio Piccirilli the sculptor of Fragilina said "Every person has his own ideal of beauty stored away in his subconscious mind. When facial characteristics are precisely delineated, the observer is denied the opportunity of personally visualizing his ideal type."
The in between of this and the next are the models for that ideal who’s names we know, who we can track across multiple painting or sculptures and usually romances, like Rodin’s Camille Claudelle and Boticelli’s Simonetta Vispucci. Fourth wall breakers.
The next tier are the Familiar bodies. The working title was Contested bodies, which was used in a wall text about Dutch painters who used peasants and townsfolk as models and I liked the sound of, but when I googled it a book about pregnancy, child rearing and slavery in Jamaica came up, which is not the association I’m going for. I’m going for an association like Rodin’s man with the broken nose, who has a face that, as Rilke described it, ‘had not been touched by life, but had been afflicted with it, over and over, as though an implacable hand had held it down in fate as in the maelstrom of a rinsing, gnawing water’. Like satyrs with faces you can imaging sweating under a heavy load on a dirt road or swollen with liquor at a bar.
The fourth are the relics. I love them because they are both alleged and worshipped which is one of my favorite combinations a thing can be. Mary magdalenes tooth is there in a glass orb. Scraps of cloth a saint wore or locks of hair from a holy head. I love relics.The hair at the back of my head is shorter than the rest because I’m always making a little braid and cutting it off to give to my boyfriend or hang on our wall. I have a ring with a crown that fell out of his head when he was eating candy. When Peanut the cat’s whiskers fall out and I collect them on a piece of tape on the fridge.
One very popular form of reliquary is to take a tiny strand of your own DNA and encase it in a chalice made of your baby and have that container become so revered that it becomes a human person, who can in turn make its own reliquaries that by a genius stroke of luck will also have your relic inside of them forever and ever over and over forever all the way down the line. I love being a reliquary for some early cave painter or fire bringer.
The fourth famous body at the metropolitan museum of art is the bodies around you. There are sooooo many. It feels like too many even at 2pm on a Tuesday when you think it won’t be. And they all sound and smell and look so different, and there’s so much variety, more than can be found in every single artwork put together. Gigantic families of red heads or teens making out in the temple of Dendur or babies or old people, bodies alone bodies together bodies in awe, bodies who clearly wish they were some where else, bodies who’s feet hurt, bodies.
I saw a woman with two perfectly symmetrical scrapes on either knee in front of Cabanel’s Venus, and I wondered how she got them and if they still hurt and I thought about her day, how every time she sat to rest or pee the scrapes hurt a little and i thought about her body and time because she is famous now.
I saw a vagina in the bathroom, of a living person not a stone or paint person,very much by accident. I didn’t see her face or any identifiable parts of her so there was no risk of shame of recognition after but She’s famous to me now.
Independent from her personality or even the rest of her body which wasn’t visible through the inappropriately generous space between the door and the wall that my eye truly innocently moved over.
I grew up in a home with no locking doors and I didn’t know about locking the bathroom door until when I was in 3rd grade and Jesse H walked in on me peeing, and in less than a second I became famous to him and him to me and also I learned to lock the bathroom door.
I saw a young girl who was sooooo tired and leaning on her dad scanning the room for a bench and her body is famous to me. Her dads too for propping it up, and making it. I didn’t shed but did feel a tear from it, I’m a very weepy person, commercials make me cry, black holes make me cry, paintings make me cry, cows and horses in paintings especially not in a vegetarian way but in a parochial way. Landscapes don’t make me cry yet but I’ve always thought that once I’m smarter (or once I’m smart again, depending on the day) they will. It’s not sad crying, a lot of it is happy crying, and this isn’t to brag about being very sensitive, it’s just a body thing, I’m not a dancer and I’m not very body expressive but I sure do cry.
Going to a museum is a nice thing your body can enjoy with other bodies like sex or the weather.
Have a happy my birthday everyone