Substack: Proximity to Power (Part 2): Fictionalize (and fantasize)

I started a newsletter on Substack. Here’s an excerpt from the second post. Read in full (and subscribe for free) here.

I’ve always liked writing for specific people and contexts: creating a submission for a zine, a text for an art show, or a friend’s project. It’s not so much collaboration as inspiration, and my early writing work was driven by the certainty that it would be read by particular individuals or groups of people. Being part of a loose cohort of young artists in NYC in the late aughts and early 2010s (there is always a loose cohort of young artists in NYC at any given time) offered opportunities to present a number of experimental writing projects. 

Although I’d recently graduated from art school and had the option and ability to create visual artworks if I wanted, I liked making written work designed for galleries instead: it functioned differently than the artworks in the space, and my own presence could be nearly invisible when my writing was formatted as a press release or exhibition text. I enjoyed the idea of injecting my essence into something functional and semi-hidden, of subtly influencing the proceedings beneath surface perceptions.

One of the first pieces I showed in New York was was “Tudes,” which took the form of a performance at the now-defunct (a prefix that applies to most spaces of this era) Cleopatra’s in Greenpoint, a space run for ten years by four young art professionals during their off hours from jobs at larger galleries. A portmanteau of “attitude” and “dudes” (lol), “Tudes” was a series of short vignettes told from the perspective of several male competitive snowboarders residing in Whistler, Canada. 

I wanted to fictionalize (and fantasize) some of my own experiences as a former ski racer who grew up training in the area, as well as my teenage years as an extroverted partier, and express that via characters who couldn’t be mistaken for me. As someone who was married to a guy at the time, I was also interested in exploring the “mystique” of the fuckboy (although the term didn’t exist in my vocabulary back then), as well as aligning aesthetically with cis masculinity as a source of “freedom” and authority (much more on this later). 

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