'LIFEMORTS' by Fin Simonetti at Interstate Projects, New York

 

BLOOD SWEAT AND TEARS

— Michelangelo, supposedly

On October 21 in Lowell Massachusetts two pit bulls ripped a seven-year-old boy to death.

When asked how he carved the David, Michelangelo is said to have replied, “It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”

There are figures latent in a given body, in a chunk of material. Even now as I write you I feel my latency pressing against the clothes I’ve hidden myself in.

When you don’t know if you’re going to start sobbing or pull the trigger, you’re experiencing twenty-first century eroticism.

Potentials, appetites, concatenations of conditioning. There are mysteries bred into my blood and nurtured by chance—fed on raw fortune, on how, and how much this particular day will turn out to have fed on my flesh.

Fin Simonetti began carving marble in January 2017.

“The body that is a threat and the body that is threatened,” she says.

And she says, “Visceral knowledge of particular forms of suffering opens up your mind and body, fine-tunes your empathy.”

Whose lobed head drew your warm hand, and was it a someone, and what head of flesh-pink marble threatened the cherished fruit of your flesh, swaddled like an unexploded bomb behind your fly?

What animal’s skin was nearly as thin, nearly as translucent and quivering as yours?

It began before you got here, and it won’t be over when you leave.

And though prophylaxis was offered you, is always takeable by you, the chance to self-protect before you fully cross the threshold, the threat inside you and the menace without were always going to have to meet, were always shivering with the possibility of touching, always moving toward one another, even blind, even in denial, drawn almost romantically into the psychedelic sorrow of the entire situation, the times, the room strewn with agate shits, the moment of truth when the culture itself really enters you, really goes in, and punctures your flesh, and draws out your moisture, makes water in the desert. As if that were the only way to make water in the desert. But maybe it is.

A lamentation of athletes, a leash made of medical bracelets, muzzles like fetishes on the altar of all prevention and punishment.

Man’s best friend is an unpaid subcontractor of rage, with eyes as sad and sexual, and as evacuated, as a convicted sicario’s.

I think this is a roadside altar. I think it is a place to mourn. There’s a window made of insulation. It’s condomed. There are modern saints in tears. And the killers bred for sport and sorrow, that’s us. Let us pray.

— Ariana Reines