Revenge Body, two-channel video
Exhibited at Liquid Architecture, Capitalist Surrealism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, September 24 2015 and at Art Bar (curated by Hissy Fit), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 30 October 2015.
Death drive, or: urge to return, loop of matter back to itself, float towards non-resolution, a pressure both alien and internal, the surplus that unravels, some constant threat to social liveability, states undead but deathlike, all our ultimate revenge bodies. Anxiety or melancholy. Aggro equal to libido. Good and bad partial-objects. Not belonging of a projection. Slick little jackets.
Multipacks, or: microbial colonies, algorithms talking to algorithms, a google deep dream, systems as swarms. Denial in a buzz is no escape at all. Effortless, thick cloud.
Addenda, or: the subject that is symbolically erotic and actually pornographic (per poetry).
The Revenge Body is a response to heartbreak. Once the Other is a stranger, the best defence is a body that is ever-stranger. An ex can’t long for a body they don’t remember, but an ex can long for a body that appears – as if a weapon – an alien form of almost-recognisable desire. In an economy of the couple-form, Revenge Bodies are strategies of post-romance warfare. In an economy of competitive erotics, Revenge Bodies are untradeable entities, valued for their belatedness. Body as revenge is like sharpening a memory into a shank- blade, punishment for the possession of an afterimage. But revenge is only as good as the market from which it emerges, glinting like a deviant. The market logic of romance is rotten; revenge bodies are the cryptocurrency it deserves.
