“Fluid connections, the celebration of ambiguity and a sense of ritual in chaos are central concerns of another prominent type of mythmaking in contemporary art: the reemergence of a Gothic psyche. Deeply invested in the notion of complexity, this work explores the arena of the monstrous as an entrée to rapture...Mythic space is best created: fluid and fluctuating, awkward and antagonistic, creative and experimental. It represents an open realm of possibility in which violence and vulnerability, vision and destruction, desire and anguish coexist.”
Chainmaille: Wall
Chainmaille is a protective tapestry, a skin, a weaving together of the anachronistic past with traces of the future
Chainmail is a medieval technology, linked to gothic aesthetics and material history that seeped through cultural boundaries, much like the historic Dracula, being a figure of Carpathia, who trespassed Christian and Muslim nations, like the mythic Dracula, divagated between death (redundancy) and life. Chainmail shape-shifts between fabric and metal, between cold and responding to touch. It forms a disguise, a protective covering that erases identifiable markers, it has a whiff of BDSM, it is both a sheath and a porous conduit for environmental hazards, rendering its armour anachronistic to metaphysical and immaterial threats. The threat of the gay vampire is the perceived danger of contamination, yet being visible and queer leaves us exposed to real and present peril.
Maille, an action that links, or enmeshes, at once a loop or a stitch in time, but perhaps also a fish’s gill, sutures, a ladder, a chain or scale.
Chainmaille: Wall
a glory hole filled membrane, a web, a protective sleeve
“Butch… tells us nothing with his body language. Butch has no past, no history; if anyone was born yesterday, it was Butch”
Chainlink as Ampersand
I want to ampersand the butch with the gothic; both present blank identities whilst being detectable, throughother identities that encode non-codes—auto-fictions that simultaneously empty-out selfhood & sublimate its blank double to veils of performativity. The butch fantasy, a drag of virile masculinity, counterpoints the fragility of the gothic character, whose shroud is a stand-in for marked flesh, and whose identity is revealed through the porphyry colour staining the curtains.
A wire curled around the last line of its otherwise, shadow to an interweave of cold metal, we find desire coils a queering of soft steel, enmeshment of a museum afternoon’s loop—cruising the medieval wing—a tapestry hidden from the damaging gaze of light. Fleeting figures thrusting a repeat; four in one. Within these words imagining: joust, butch, errant, quest, queer, chain, bed fellows, horseplay, annealed rings, anal tease, pillow talk, clutched tightly passions or these perversions of armour tongue dancing in amour—breathlessly to those cloistered deviations—fantasies.
“…But, even aside from the homosexual frisson of showing that the man who reveals that he is really a woman is really something else—more glamorous, more sinister, more potent, and even blanker—this development is ingeniously of a piece with the broader Gothic notion of personal identity.…” & ”…While the “identity” a pendant represents is only the character’s social identity, that turns out to be an intimate and inclusive category: one’s true name, one’s closest ties, and one’s radical erotic choices—how one responds to a stranger’s hug in the middle of the night—all hang on it.”
