Art Basel Vignette 1: Ex-Child Model
Art Basel 2021 Vignettes in honor of Art Basel 2022.
Upcoming Art Basel nonfiction topics: psychotic states, thanatosis, synchronicity, A Tiger Painting I stalked. then I stalked the artist via instagram (she seems to identify as a predatory feline, as well! synchronicity…)
Pay no attention to this woman in front of the wall drawing.
It’s a stare down with a Sol LeWitt “Wall Drawing”. We are concrete. We are abstract. It is a duel of duality. It is the Kubrick Stare versus the Cubic Stare. Loser about-faces these reimagined faces careening around a maze of “Puzzle” bags . If you, concrete wall, could talk, this exchange of views would flow like the lava of abstractions1. I’m awaiting the arrival of a human being who will destroy my mind and spirit. Later, not now. Not here. Here, in this final arrondissement, an irreversible zone in the Art Basel-tangential hell-scape.
The precious wall-to-wall moment is interrupted by a luxury purveyor or, better, an arbiter of expensive taste or whatever sales assistants are called here. I kind of know her, but we have never seen one another sans face masks.
She opens with, “Oh. My. God. Were you a child model? You totally look like a former child model.”
Never will a compliment top this masterpiece. Here’s the ex-child model, whose rare surgically-unaltered facial features evoke print catalogs and newspaper department store advertisements. This assertion resurrects uninvited imagery of grown men, which I replace with a one-second-fantasy that I child-modeled as a Black-Footed Cat kitten in the wildly popular nineties World Wildlife Federation symbolic species adoption campaign. Black-Footed Cats are the smallest cats in Africa, but they prey upon animals twice their size.
I swipe yet another glass of champagne from a tray and siphon it like an alcoholic squid right in front of her.
The “raised by wolves” speculation about me is a valid one . Some domestic animals are put outside for bad behavior, a puzzling concept. Is it punishing to frolic in lost landscapes of wild origins? I identified as a cat at a young age (and still very much do). In feline fashion, I skulked in wooded corners and bramble patches, sometimes ambling on all fours chasing squirrels. “Where is she?!” She’s out in the summer air throwing rocks at wasp’s nests and catching toads by the creek. Other girls in the neighborhood pushed baby dolls in carriages. I once tethered my feral-born, fanged, fluffy black cat to the interior of a toy carriage. “This is Rosemary’s baby,” I’d explained. My solo excursions provided much temptation for a child with Pica disorder, my first diagnosed mental illness. In secret and slowly over time, I consumed an entire section of a sidewalk. 2
Oh, here he is. The human being has arrived.
My bedroom walls in elementary school were lined with symbolic endangered animal adoption posters. His gray-green eyes evoke the eyes of wolves on one of them. The leader of the pack stared straight into the lens, a majestic and intimidating creature. Of course, as one of their adoptive saviors, I viewed this endangered animal as vulnerable and beguiling and familiar. I try to look into these human eyes, but he averts his eyes each time I maintain eye contact.
He’s very kind. He’s “not that guy”, underscored, stated repeatedly.
He’s kind enough to point out a character flaw dating back to the good old days on the kitty-walk. Not here, not now, but soon. He will say:
“You made me feel like a sexual predator.”
Oh, no. I’ve done it again.
Once a child model, always a child model.
“Misogyny often involves distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, by the lights of their conformity to patriarchal norms and values.”
“The good guy can do no wrong; so we won’t hear a bad word said against him. I call this the ‘honorable Brutus’ problem.”
Kate Manne, philosopher and author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women 3
Psychosis began setting in. (Plan to post writing about specific psychotic states, and I think paranoid delusions are by far the most interesting.)
“lava of abstractions” is found in the poem “A Suicidal Nightmare” (in Land of Unlikeness) by Robert Lowell (manic depressive poet see: my first post Robert Lowell et Moi)
I ate concrete, an entire blanket, stuffed animals’ fur, pebbles, dirt, paper, crayons, medicine, poinsietta flowers, et al. I did not eat anything human or animal.
Manne, K. (2020). Entitled: how male privilege hurts women (First edition.). Crown.