Hazing the Muse

A collaborative body of work made with Rya Kleinpeter. To preface A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes reminds us that "the necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude." Hazing the Muse splays Rya Kleinpeter and Benjy Russell across just such a discourse. The photographs here are acts of love, born out of a deep and deeply devious respect for the images, and it is in the longing to join together that the subject and the object can't help but trying to destroy themselves after all. Bound and blinded, they both put on lipstick so that we will look at their lips while they obscure the exact pink of the flesh. It is this turning inward by turning outward, this determined and self-negating stare, where the action happens. The bodies of the artists become sites not just of their humiliating affection, but of their greedy consumption. Archetypes become edible, and as we feast on cherries and hummingbirds, Kleinpeter is denied a banana and Russell chokes on a lemon. Like all the best masochisms, it's impossible to tell who is actually in control here. Beauty startles, it damages. We seek it because we love someone, by which we often just mean to say that we love ourselves. Roland Barthes was a gay man who lived almost his entire adult life with his mother and somewhere in rural Tennessee a massive, white sculpture of impossible geometry hangs above a creek. We don't know if Kleinpeter put it there for Russell or Russell for Kleinpeter because, in truth, what lingers is the difficulty of its suspension, the labor that marks devotion. Both subjects remain subjects, unjoined to the other and aching, as a trail of balloons rises from the cave's agape mouth.