a serpent and a dragon walk into a museum of early modern artefacts
[monologue]
:sits down and, holding it between two backwards left hand knuckles, lights it, with the right hand and places it in the ashtray:
PAUSE
Serpent year _comin’ up, huh.
_on’t know about [ch]y’all but, for Me, dragon year was a Bitch. Def-a-bitch I needed tho…
:lifts it to lips and then a sharp inhale:
[dialogue]
The fire-breathing dragon energy speaks to me about destruction. A duality arises that is one of confusion, as in, am I being burned alive or is it my own breath which has incinerated everything? The answer matters not, when destruction is the only way forward and it’s giving that good rising-from-the-ashes energy. It’s too intense to do more than once in a while, but it works. Serpent energy is, to state the obvious, much more slithery, of course. People think that’s a bad thing but it’s such a gentle way to transform. Wriggling those hips. This body is nothing but hips, no limbs just hips switching back and forth and what is left behind is a cute little piece of paper shaped like the thin evidence of what I used to be. Nobody died.
In one of my favourite books of hers and of all time, Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson writes of the importance of reading two texts side by side, no matter what they are, as a way to yield a finer shape in your knowledge, from both as individual entities and from the meeting of the two. Both books exposing a relief of the other and/or a third thing entirely growing out of the crash between two worlds. I mean, this is curating, really it’s not rocket science, if anything it is what persists from classicism and yes I do feel like it is still worth the violence to wrestle with classicism cuz you never know, we might accidentally fuckin’ kill’im —
(haaaaa!) Some! hereafter,
‘Love him as we might’ not admit on the B/black W/web
where I searched that phrase and the machine propositioned back: As you wait on God, will you love him?
Do you love him, or are you just attached?
Do I really love him or just the idea of him?
As pathetic as it may be, I’ll always love him more than…
-and-
How I Learned to Love Him, Let Him Be, And Still Be Me.
(and That! would be my treatise on how to survive the old masters. Hmpf.)
[are we outside?]
On the web she calls me twin and so I am confident that Dom would appreciate me calling her a dragon, or that the work is dragon-coded or that it is formulated through a dragon like methodology. I spin out when I accept there is no way out of the old master’s ___ (house? No. Grip? No. Hook? Hm, okay.) and seek a life by charging towards death and disintegration, a path I’m not sure why anyone would choose other than because it is the only one that might work. In Lewis I’m seeing a gentle wriggle in how he unzips a difference between the otherwise identical unspoken and unspeakable. A snake is born with a heart rate slower than the average human’s but I don’t know what to make of that because the bar for human health is in the 7th layer of dragon hell because capitalism—
anyway, I wrote, ‘flowers’. My next treatise will be a bio-political theory of flowers. I wrote, ‘myth dream nightmare’. Is that the third thing? The nightmare, emerging from reading the myth and the dream side by side? I wrote, ‘earthy warm tones’.
I wrote, for Audience inculcated on old masters, paintings induce an anxiety about the refusal to be looked at with direct eyes. Stay still! Audience pleads and they reply, no. Audience becomes unsettled by not being permitted to look as they would at a stable-over-time object and when you don’t let Audience look, you reveal the limits of its emotional range and its attachment issues.
-Taylor Le Melle
Lewis Hammond (b. 1987, UK) lives and works between London, UK and Berlin, DE. Selected solo exhibitions include This Glass House, The Perimeter, London, UK (2024); This Glass House, Kunstpalais, Erlangen, DE (2024); Evocações, Ismael Nery and Lewis Hammond, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, BR (2023); Bludgeoned Sky, 47 Canal, New York, US (2023); Turbulent Drift, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2022) among more. Selected group exhibitions include 8th Yokohama Triennale “Wild Grass: Our Lives”, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, JP (2024); Room by Room: Concepts, Themes, and Artists in The Rachofsky Collection, The Warehouse, Dallas, US (2023); Der pinkelnde Tod or what the dead do, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Bielefeld, DE (2023) among more.
Dominique White (b. 1993, UK) lives and works between Marseille, FR and Essex, UK. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Deadweight, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2024); Destruction of Order, Veda, Florence, IT (2024); Dominique White and Alberta Whittle: Sargasso Sea, ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia, US (2024); When Disaster Strikes, Kunsthalle Münster, Münster, DE (2023) among more. Recent group exhibitions include La Haute Note Jaune, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, FR (2024); Among the Invisible Joins, Museion, Bolzano, IT (2024); Phantom Sculpture, Mead Gallery, Coventry, UK (2023) among more.