Palermo Catacombs #7 (Two Girls Together)

Sisters, probably, hopefully—uncomfortably morbid if friends, not that the baseline morbidity of the whole catacomb schtick screams comfort. If not for the skulls, we could think them all fabric. Surrounded by reclining monks, long past sleep, the only vertical recess, twins not standing, but propped—a dead body can’t pose, but it can be posed. See? Death hides in admissible syntax, acceptable subjects, irreducibly explains certain grammatical judgements. A standing corpse is a joke, like giving your friend a tree that you don’t own.

Rachel, Greer Lankton

You notice the ribs first. They stick out like a fuck-you, reminding you that the body has limits and that we can reach them, issuing a provocation that the raised eyebrow, smirking mouth, and insouciant hands only serve to reinforce. Then, you learn that this portrait-doll once served as a mannequin in a boutique window, and you have to stifle a laugh. Mannequins are meant to disappear, to serve as an empty space into which you can imaginatively step. Their anatomy is smooth, as unscientific as a wire hanger. Imagine Rachel, draped in the latest fashions, staring you down. Please, she seems to say. Do you really think you can pull this off?

Gary Indiana Veiled

Gary does his job, serving beatific, but that’s not really what this is about. Look to the vanishing point of the folds, about an inch to our left of his nape, and you’ll see the focal center. The face is background for the rhinestones and the fabric, making the latter visible by contrast and contour. Capturing something translucent, showing not just your material but what your material passed through to be shown—isn’t that always the problem?

Palermo Catacombs #6 (Girl with Gloves)

Any corpse can be a doll, if your stomach’s strong enough. The curator didn’t seem to get the jokes. A mime pretends his hands are a wall, a ventriloquist pretends his wood can talk, a monk pretends his dead girl needs gloves. It’s a funny reversal, right? I mean, putting aside that she’s dead and doesn’t know about the gloves or about anything at all, gloves are for keeping dirt off your hands, and a corpse is dirt just waiting to happen. So, the gloves are inside out. Isn’t that funny?

Gary Schneider in Contortion (I)

The contortionist’s job is to make a position formed by intense tension and stress appear relaxed and natural. His look asks what the matter is, as though we’re the odd ones, what with our childish attachment to obtuse angles and bilateral symmetries. We can’t help thinking that maybe it’s different for him, that maybe he could be stored like this for spatial efficiency, unfolded only when called for. The camera is an accomplice, blotting out past and future, convincing us of a system at rest.

Greer Lankton’s Legs

“Sensitive and sensual, [Hujar’s] depictions of Lankton align with his belief in the beauty and visual interest of nonconforming bodies that exist outside norms of sexuality, gender, and class.”

This is a photograph of a woman’s legs, smooth, with delicate calves, bent at the knees, crossed at the ankles, wearing a pair of open-toe mule heels. Where is the nonconformity? What norms do these legs transgress? They are the model to which conformity is enjoined: flawless, barring the requisite concessions to personal taste. So, enough feigned bafflement. We all know why someone might see this picture and think about the blurring of lines, about Greer’s family who “fully supported,” about The Body. Try how instead. How do political institutions, ideologies, media cliches, the Oedipal family, economic actors, and your unlisted villain of choice enmesh to produce a person who can look without seeing? How can someone see a sandwich as a gun, or a scared child as a military-aged male, or a duck as a rabbit? How can they stop?

Palermo Catacombs #10 (Girl with Flowers)

We’re supposed to treat corpses “lovingly,” but only in the right ways. Right ways to be “loving” include: clothes, pillows, poses, makeup before a certain stage of decay, floral arrangements, injections: one part glycerin, one part formalin saturated with zinc salts, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid, courtesy Alfredo Salafia, Rosalia’s vitrifier. Wrong ways to be “loving” include: you know where this is going. People get upset if you do the wrong ones. That’s one of the big distinctions, really, between a body and a corpse, is how you really can’t fuck the latter, and not in the way that fucking inanimate objects is distasteful and eccentric, but in the sense that part of what it really means to go from body to corpse is to go from the paradigmatic object of fucking to the paradigmatically unfuckable.

So who is a glass coffin for? Hujar knows a frame when he sees one. A wood coffin protects the corpse from desecration, a marble coffin protects the corpse from ignominy, an earthen coffin protects water from contamination and the living from reminders. A glass coffin protects nothing. It creates a viewer, peering in, which makes the corpse and its arrangement an artwork, to be admired, to stir one’s emotions, to be lingered before, but certainly not to be touched, anything but touched. Numbers 19:11: “He that toucheth the dead body of any man shall be unclean seven days.” A fortiori, he that fucketh. The glass both keeps us away and puts on proud display the handiwork of the one person around whom we relax these taboos for social expedience: the undertaker, the mortician, the monk charged with the visual merchandising of these cadavers. The wealthy families of Palermo, sending their regular payments to keep their daughter’s corpse from rotating back to the post-meat lockers reserved for the relatives of less lucrative mourners, must have felt the glass coffin’s taunt as they passed, knowing that what they saw was not their daughter but an assemblage, made with their daughter’s body as component, all elements arranged in loving detail.

Arthur Rimbaud in New York (I), David Wojnarowicz

In Rimbaud’s Paris, the peep show was a paper accordion, producing depth from flatness by means of arrangement and perspective, promising for a moment a world available to the viewer alone, to look and not to touch. This is, after all, not so different from the prurient entertainments advertised here behind our pseudo-Rimbaud. Nor can it be distinguished from the compositional approach of the picture, with one hand presenting us the illusion of Rimbaud’s presence and, with the other, reminding us of this illusion’s fragility, its dependence on the position of the camera. Changing the angle would make visible the flatness of the mask, confirming a sleight of hand already obvious to us, being familiar as we are with that unmistakable face. Plausibility and impossibility intermingle: we are as sure that Rimbaud could have been there as we are sure that, as it happens, he wasn’t. This effect depends equally on anonymity of the body and recognition of the face.

You can’t help but scrape the scraps for predecessors, get pareidoilic with the wreckage, being as you are a genealogical dead end—from their perspective you’re a broken rung, a stunted branch, and so their perspective won’t do, will it? So you build filiations of your own, recognize yourself by fiat in the “few surviving photographs,” in his thoughts on cities and crowds and blood, in the way he might have leaned and cruised. And of course you balk sometimes at your own interpretive excesses, knowing full well that the undeniable similarities can’t warrant identification, being as we are now generally post-, but by the time you’re even capable of such misgivings you’ve put the narrative to work in your own construction and made it structural, so what choice do you have? Try your best to enjoy it.

Arthur Rimbaud in New York (II), David Wojnarowicz

And as he ran through the streets, age six, assuming he did, assuming it wasn’t just a story, not that it really matters if it was, proclaiming the good news of our universal approach towards death, he must have seen, however dimly, how in discovering that we all die he had also discovered that things end, that things have ended, and he must have known, perhaps much later, perhaps only once he had become completely abstracted, that if things end they end here, they don’t go somewhere else where we can’t get to them, they end and then we have them and we can share them or continue them or forget them or scrape them for parts, which must have thrilled him, shown him that things could be made, because something isn’t made until the making has ended, just as it must have thrilled Rimbaud in his house in Aden, in what must have still been for him Arabia Felix, there with the telegraph wire which sutured empires whose ends were then still unimagined, empires fueled in small part by the beans selected carefully by the women in his employ, five of which he must have left behind by accident when this too ended, as these five beans remain ensconced in five alcoves along a wall in the House of Poetry, as his Aden residence is now known, bit of a silly name given that no poet lived there, only a man who had killed a poet some years earlier, who had been through women’s hell and learned there the unbearable identity of birth and its opposite, must have, who called himself a master of silence then proved it, who left behind for us a beautiful corpse made up in chief by two books and a photograph, passed across a century and an ocean to David, who must have seen that Mallarmé got it all wrong, that Rimbaud hadn’t excised poetry from himself but had excised the self in which poetry had sprouted, had left us not just the poems and the letters but the lovers, and the myth, and the eyes, had ended it, had left behind in France the face that would make its way into David’s fertile paranoia and from there to Coney Island, beside these rocks that could be anywhere but aren’t, on this body that could be anyone but isn’t, bearing or borne by that completion which we all must eventually have.

Arthur Rimbaud in New York (III), David Wojnarowicz

My reference image for this photograph, which has by now replaced in my memory any initial experience of the long-since ended exhibition, primarily shows my reflection. I don’t like it.

Ethyl Eichelberger in a Fashion Pose

Most nights, walking home, she had passed on her right the empty lot, four buildings east of her own, fenced but ungated, and considered germination. This pattern was on the verge of habit when it was disgracefully interrupted by an impact on the outer side of her right ankle. She was passing the lot, as she had done dozens of times before, sometime in the thirty minutes after midnight. The collision was forceful enough to startle, but not enough so as to trip her or deflect her path. The object was neither hard nor soft. Looking to her right, the only motion she could detect was the rustling of overgrown grasses, not implausibly caused by wind.

She concluded that it was probably a rat and continued walking, climbed the steps of the porch, sat down on the topmost of said steps, and lit a cigarette. The wind had died, and, with the flame thus unthreatened, the ritual was almost unconscious, a perfect unbroken gesture that perhaps gave rise to the moment which would shortly ensue.

Her legs, staggered between the second and third step; her right arm, resting on the rail, bent at the elbow with the forearm pointing upwards, palm also facing upwards at 45 degrees, fingers partially open but not extended, fanned out; her left arm, draped over her left knee at the wrist, a lit cigarette between the second and third fingers; her shoulders, turned to the right; her back, straight; her head, upright, tilted imperceptibly back; her eyes forward; her mouth neutral.

As she posed, she realized that she was posing.

A pose implies a viewer, since to pose is always to be posed. Sometimes, of course, the viewer is also the model, whether in mirrors or as an imagined external viewer, as one creates when one sets out to pose, which she of course had not. Sometimes, the viewer can be a camera, or an animal, or a doll. However, since she had been entirely unselfconscious before her realization, and since there were no animals or dolls or other anthropomorphized objects in sight, the only possible conclusion was that she was being watched. She knew all this at once.

Irrational, she understood, to treat a grammatical observation like a security system, but that understanding couldn’t change what she knew. She knew that there was nobody in the cars along the street or on the porches facing her, and she knew that the windows seemed empty, and she also knew that from her current position any viewer sufficiently to her left or to her right would be invisible.

Of course, turning her head to look was out of the question, as doing so would break the pose. A pose is always immobile, but a pose is also untouchable. Think of a movable doll: first the arrangements and adjustments, and only then the step back, the taking in, the admiring. The viewer can, of course, move to get a better angle, see the matter from all sides. Yet any viewer would know that approaching too close would startle her, breaking the stillness, ending her time as model but, by the same token, ending the viewer’s time as viewer. An inconceivable crime against conatus.

Things could not go on. Even at this late hour, the uncommonly quiet night was bound to regress to the mean, jostling her composure with some sensible accident. The wind could rise. A car could pass. A bug could fly into her nose. The arrangement was too exact, intolerant of alterations, brittle in its precision. Even the un-ashed cigarette was essential to the composition’s balance, sprouting from the arc of her fingers like anatomy, uplifting the hand into carcinogenic polydactyly. How would the viewer react, once stripped of title and role? She pictured the rage and spite of failure: a flipped chessboard, an abandoned puzzle, clay squashed back into formlessness. She tried to remember which pocket held her keys.

She coughed. Nothing stirred. Standing up, she let her hand and her guard fall.

Candy Darling on her Deathbed

“Here is the beautiful, pathetic story of one of the greatest names in history.” “Handwriting styles vary widely in these journals as Candy ‘tried on’ various psychological roles.” “Material was excerpted from a number of diaries.”

“I lead a dull uninteresting existence.” “When I first saw it I said, ‘Oh no, is that my flesh?’” “I try to get what I want whenever it’s possible.” “Always have 5 dimes. And every telephone number.” “I was born to be a queen and every time I come down from the throne I am humiliated for it and suffer many indignities.” “I must take the steps necessary to further my ability to function on the highest level I can operate on.”

“I dreamt of a nightclub with the atmosphere of a beach.” “I’m such a fucking self-imposed martyr.” “I see so much of life I can not have.” “Am I in hell?” “He kissed me on the back of my neck. He sang in my ear.”

“So greatly did the French people love her, that although she failed in her mission and died a martyr’s death, the memory of her short hour of glory carried her people on to ultimate victory.” “She was marvelous, she looked like a young boy.” “I already know a lot of people and until one of them dies I couldn’t possibly know anyone else.” “His face seemed to be saying to me it’s really you I love mentally it was all you. But then I am not mentally well.”

“l am not a genuine woman but I am not interested in genuineness.” “Last week I went to IFA and was so glamorous that I overheard a man in the outer room gasp out loud.” “I don’t mind that little smile around a person’s face when they talk about me.” “He was young and very beautiful. I hope he doesn’t call.”

“By the time you read this I will be gone. Unfortunately before my death I had no desire left for life. Even with all my friends and my career on the upswing I felt too empty to go on in this unreal existence. I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death. It may sound ridiculous but is true. I have arranged my own funeral arrangements with a guest list and it is paid for. I would like to say goodbye to Jackie Curtis, I think you’re fabulous. Holly, Sam Green a true friend and noble person, Ron Link I’ll never forget you, Andy Warhol what can I say, Paul Morrissey, Lennie you know I loved you, Andy you too, Jeremiah don’t take it too badly just remember what a bitch I was, Geraldine I guess you saw it coming. Richard Turley & Richard Golub I know I could’ve been a star but I decided I didn’t want it. Manuel, I’m better off now. Terry I love you, Susan I am sorry, did you know I couldn’t last I always knew it. I wish I could meet you all again.”

“I’m a thousand different people. Every one is real.”

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L.A. Leere is a writer and editor living in Chicago, reachable at lou.a.leere@gmail.com for barter opportunities, field reports, gainful employment, and queening out.