Bodies, buildings

i


have a crush. a


literary


crush.


not with an author, per se.
not even with a fictional character.
but with a piece of writing itself.
with a textual body.


Whether or not it’s subversive or simply downright perverse to fancy a piece of art, for the past three years, I’ve had somewhat on-again, off-again, let’s call it a relational obsession with the late iconoclast Kathy Acker’s 1993 essay, ‘AGAINST ORDINARY LANGUAGE: THE LANGUAGE OF THE BODY’ ².

(I type it here capitalised because that’s how it appears in Yvonne Buchiem’s free online PDF, my go-to, with little wings around it).

Said relational obsession began during the first year of my MFA, in late 2021. I’d never heard of Acker before (sacrilege), but a classmate mentioned this particular essay.

They said it had partially informed a performance of theirs, where they’d made a partition wall into a giant 5-foot arsehole, zipped themselves up into a brown sleeping bag and then continually shat themselves through the wall for 4 hours straight. Something wholly original about bodily autonomy. There weren’t many questions asked. But obviously, I had to read the essay.


Enter Yvonne Buchiem’s free online PDF and
there’s your meet-cute.


~

Acker's essay begins with her describing that for some time, she’s been unsuccessfully trying to write about her personal experiences of bodybuilding. Acker explains that despite having been bodybuilding by this point for the better part of a decade, ‘time and time again’, whenever she puts pen to paper after being in the gym, she fails to write — observing that

Throughout the text Acker ponders on this conundrum, critically engaging with why the material act of bodybuilding seems to transcend verbal language — why bodybuilding seems indescribable using, what Acker calls, ‘ordinary language’.

‘To come face to face with chaos, with my own failure or a form of death’ ².

Taken, of course, from the 1993 essay, these words are from a section where Acker details the concept of pushing to failure within bodybuilding. ‘Failure’, is the term used for when your muscles have been worked up to the point where they physically can’t move any more weight. This process is necessary in bodybuilding to elicit hypertrophy, the building of more muscle.

In order to grow a muscle, one must first break the muscle down. You want to do enough reps that you physically can’t do any more, but you don’t want to hurt or injure the muscle. To do this you must strive for ‘perfect form’ — that is, carrying out the movement in its most optimal pattern to target that muscle or muscle group. In other words, ultimately, you’re constantly striving to fail in the face of perfection.

~


My appropriated text was digitally printed in the black font Cormorant Garamond, on four 3m by 90cm white cotton sheets, one line of text per sheet, and presented like a concrete poem.

The sheets were suspended from the ceiling with steel wires and left to dangle with the bottom edges sitting around 1m above the floor. Below the sheets sat four grey, plaster cast troughs, which at first glance look like they could be concrete. The troughs were situated underneath each suspended sheet, as if ready to catch the tumbling words.

The first trough, laid under the first sheet, which read ‘Face to Face with chaos’, was fully intact.

The second, under ‘all eyes on my failures’, was slightly broken around the edges, visibly marked and cracked.

The third, ‘arms outstretched to oblivion’, was almost entirely destroyed, smashed into separate chunks dispersed within about 1m of the base of the work.

The fourth trough, underneath, ‘i yield, i grow’, was again fully intact, but instead of sitting parallel to the base of the cloth like the previous troughs had, this one was pointing at an obtuse angle, toward a new direction.

The piece was titled, ‘OBLIVION’.

‘Oblivion’, 2023
cotton, ink, plaster

The work, as a whole, was transient. It felt caught between two states of being — not quite complete, but not really in need of anything to complete it either. The sheets swayed ethereally in response to the movement of bodies around them, whilst some of the printing ink had bled outside of its textual borders, giving the language a sense of fleeting inscription, like they were lifting from the cloth, very visibly to the material itself.

There was also something about the fragility and porosity of the plaster used to create the troughs. Despite being vessels, by means of their production they were rendered useless. There was something quiet, poetic, but also violent about their placement and state. There was a sense of balance, rejuvenation, destruction.


Contrary to the beguiling picture I’m painting of this work, I hated it. In some ways, I still hate it.

The cotton sheets were too small and not heavy enough to have the impact I wanted them to. Their ends were puckered and curled up, making the material look cheap and flimsy. The bleeding ink was messy, blotted with printing errors and the troughs had all cured slightly different shades of grey, carrying different degrees of moisture. Easy errors to correct with another iteration. But I dismissed it.

I threw away the troughs in a studio move. I recycled the metal and repurposed the cotton for use on another work.

I didn’t revisit the Acker text for some time. Despite the endearment I’d poured over it throughout my MFA, it was markedly absent from my final thesis.

I accepted defeat.

~


Some work, especially your own, takes time to grow on you. You have to sit with it, let it do its thing. Others, you’re just not ready for yet. Those are the ones that are hard to look at, hard to be around. But even if you can’t consciously face it, as Sin Wei Kin aptly put it in their recent panel talk at the Barbican — ‘sometimes our practices know things about us before we do’ 4. The nonconscious cognition5 is there all along, doing the heavy lifting.


Some months after the making and subsequent breaking of ‘OBLIVION’, I came out as non-binary. Just like my biceps, I realised, in order to grow anew it was necessary to break down what was already there.
I may not have been conscious of it at the time, but ‘OBLIVION’, imbued with its stolen, metamorphosed text, was the beginnings of this work. For the first time, through a language of the body no less, I was able to conceptually situate myself as something beyond the limitations that ‘ordinary language’ places on all of us.

To break away from the terms that delimit us from birth to death — a vagina and legs, a penis and shoulders.

Just like Acker’s legacy⁶ —

‘I’

the ‘I’ that bodybuilds

the ‘I’ that is the artist

the ‘I’ the writer

the ‘I’ the friend

the ‘I’ the partner

the ‘I’ the child

suddenly and easily
becomes more than just one bounded self.
Not merely a vessel, that by the means of its production is rendered useless, but something that is porous, plastic, shatterable, able to be realigned.


Sculpture may have been the process that I was finally able to understand my transness through, but it was bodybuilding — the intensely physical act of resistance, breakdown, repair — that enabled me to face that transness. Or perhaps more importantly, to question what it meant to be in possession of that transness.

For it’s this understanding of a continual closeness to failure, a continual striving for this ‘form of death’ in the face of perfection, or in other words total oblivion and movement through it — that is at the essence of trans experience.

Acker asks ‘is the equation between destruction and growth also a formula for art?’ ². In so far as life imitates art, we could also ask — is transness a formula for art?


~


A year later, as I move closer to myself, Acker’s essay finally makes sense — and her adapted words sing.

‘Adapt’ would be the correct literary term. But I prefer ‘expand’. Semantics, one might say. But here, the semantics matter.

The definition of expand, according to Google, is: