The Brooklyn Rail

MARCH 2023

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MARCH 2023 Issue
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Ode to the Vaporized Individual: Long Live the Whorish Porous

Photo: John Berens.
Photo: John Berens.

Dead ringers shimmer and pulse—incessantly. Bastards love better. One cannot take it all in at once—you’d be a moron to try. You’d be a total fucking moron to pursue autonomy, yet most try, poor things. Thus the “long shot” must be coupled with numerous close-ups, pans and cuts, across bodies, so we are tethered to life, to the screens that make us, or worse, the families on the screens that makes us. jump cuts, pans, money shots, they kill us with us.

No one is a top here mother fuckers. We’re appetites, horny whores, it used to be greedy when selves mattered, now we’re just horny, the ultimate Alienation, the individual has never been, only produced, constantly recorded for future reference.

Bodies are more than fragments, they’re holes, power bottoms ready to take anything deeper than should be safe. It's unavoidable. It’s better that way, better than breeding.

I’m a dog, I’d eat your face off if you let me, and you’d like it. There’s the rub being free, you fuck face, if I tell you in a voice you would listen too you’d believe anything. It’s all about what you like. You're a cache until you give you up, the record won’t be grief stricken without you, without you it’s nothing, or it just dementedly advances without you, a quest for progress, growth.

Feed it and you destroy vibrant vitality with your self preservation, dick blow.

Porousness is needed to death defy, not your death, but our death , and to die well you’ll have to produce a self that’s fragmented enough not defy being vaporized.

We need to be vaporized to know we’re nothing, and survive in a swarm, a mass of foam and bodies given up to some titanic, collective joy, a will that exists outside the frame. unwinding assholes behind eyes, little gems suddenly bubble to the surface: long live the porous whorish.!!! All hail the vaporized self. We get fucked by a tiny figure walking a dog behind a pop-up movie screen on an ipad in an Uber. all hail the vaporized individual, the posthumous humans aware of their fate, their defiled relationship to the sanctity of the self is total, endlessly morphing, hearing.

Buttocks exposed we face innocent faces of children, demonic, laced throughout the sugar of light, gaiety, and religiousness, and we hope for Satan, or the ilk with fiery nipples; flying phalluses and cc’d companions species.

the American /white/human individual is our contract and together our extractions buffet the abject. Let’s break up.

Let’s lose the Ghost faced killers. Already our neighbors, human and non, squirm, all living and supposed non-living life forms linger ready to pounce center stage unless we vaporize first. Suicide is the most radical act of refusal without these impulses life would actually suck.

So commit capitalist suicide, celebrate uncivilized penetration, kill your self, freak love, in undefinable kindness....

Endnote

  1. Italicized portions of Angela Dufresne's essay, "Ode to the Vaporized Individual: Long LIve the Whorish Porous," were sampled and drawn from:"Blink, Cut, Surrender: Angela Dufresne's Poltergeist," Cash (Melissa) Ragona, Angela Dufresne: Making a Scene, (published on the occasion of Dufresne's solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum) eds. Erin Dziezdic (Kansas City, Missouri: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018), pp. 21-31.

Contributor

Angela Dufresne

Angela Dufresne is a painter based in Brooklyn and can sometimes be found in Rhode Island or the Catskills. Through painting, drawing, printing making, performative works, she wields heterotopic narratives that are both non hierarchical and unapologetically perverse, conjuring the rage, piss and vinegar and passion of being incontestably an American in 2023. She’s held museum solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City Making Scene, the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz Just my Type and a solo project at the UCLA Hammer Museum. and won a guggenheim fellowship in 2016 ....among other things acceptable or otherwise. She currently has a therapist.

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The Brooklyn Rail

MARCH 2023

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