𝐶ℎ𝑎𝑜𝑠 Is Beautiful

The feeling of sucking your own face on screen

Once a month I see a bodyworker, it’s the only form of therapy I have.

He lays me down on the table and crushes my fascia into my bones, turns my joints to powder, pulls me into impossible twists.

I’ve realised that past a certain point, the mind cannot solve the problems of the mind; only the body can.

He attacks these problems with me, skin-first.

Sometimes, in the depths of the experience, I dream; I dream about the past, I dream about the future, about You. This last time, most recently — I had no dreams, only intense images:

Skulls, wolves, snakes, eggs.

Why won’t you turn your neck? he asks me, pulling at my head. What is it over there that you don’t want to see?

This is all normal for me.

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It’s this transcendence I long for when experiencing art.

To be destabilised and uncertain, overwhelmed…

You’ve felt this too — I know that’s why we found each other.

Perhaps you’ve wandered through galleries, feeling hollow inside because the work is aesthetically barren, and everyone is simply too polite to say so, and of course the art world is hard, we are all trying, and the curator, you know, they are a favourite here.

People tell me that I like extremes — although if you met me, this would surprise you. I don’t seem the type. But I can go for days without eating, my attention on you is crystal clear or nothing, and I work late into the night until my eyes bleed, keeping pace with Satan who never sleeps.

Is this enough of a pre-amble for you?

Is this – enough — for you?

You - get it?

You can live a longer life if you are more present in each moment, if you find more extremes within it, if you court the edge of intensity for long enough it stretches but never breaks you.

Chaos is beautiful.

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Kirby Casilli is playing with limits, is throwing around extremes, is tabooing and being tabooed, is organising 𝑠y𝑛cℎr𝑜n𝑖s𝑒d p𝑢b𝑙i𝑐 𝑝i𝑠s𝑖n𝑔.

The Last Show has an affective accompanying text, you should read it. I was sad to miss this, but the film documentation is being crafted and when this is screened, I will be there.

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The instant I saw the work of Leonardo Morales, I knew it would find a kindred spirit in Giovanni, in lovers of neoclassical phantasmagoria, and ULTRA.

Every eight years, the cells in your body have completed their regenerative cycle; at a molecular level you are no longer the same person.

And so writ large, we’re not the same human race that existed eight years ago, either; we’ve evolved and distorted right down to the atom.

This work has reached deep into our shared, biomechanical psyche, and come back with warped self-portraits.

You react against what they show you. There are old parts of us we are glad to be rid of. Parts of us today that we hate.

And then there’s something else. What – are we becoming?

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Harriet Richardson brings big prankster energy, but to call her a prankster would be to miss the point. She’s turned jester’s privilege into a knife.

Richardson navigates love, sex, connection, and addiction.

It is discomfiting, so we must laugh at our own dystopia — we are trying hard, we are hopeful, we are laughable and pathetic. Maybe online dating is the accelerant for our loneliness. Maybe self-love is a simulation.

Think about what performance means now, mostly experienced out of context, in feeds, our faces lit blue by screens — it can mean an Andrea Illés experimental durational livestream, or Harriet Richardson sucking her own face in Apple’s Photo Booth.

I would like to see this work on Apple.com, advertising their latest app update.

I would like to see neat, precision-designed commerce and technology overcome by lust.

Let the tensions rip through.

Sometimes the best use of a tool is its misuse.

You seek transcendent connection, but the person you really seek is you.

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