re: a memo to peregrine staff: David Cordero, Chelsea Culp, Stevie Hanley, Isabella Kendrick
Frankenstein’s wretch read The Sorrows of Young Werther during his exile in the woods, and miserably, correctly, identified with its tragic protagonist. That the currents of romance and horror run directly alongside one another is not a radical realization, but we don’t often image the monster holding a novel. When Horace warned of purple patches in poetry, and later when the lavender scare had the United States in a tizzy, what we were cautioned against was the flamboyant body and all of its coded extravagances and spills.
Someone recently told me a remarkable, albeit unrepeatable, story about rupturing pipes, a shit waterfall, and paintings in a Chelsea gallery that ended with the teller’s adamant declaration that “the body is back.” * A couple weeks later I was power spraying human waste, sun-congealed and stubborn, off the back step of a nonprofit in Chicago, and I had to agree. Fabulous, cuckold, salacious, exuberant, and dismembered indeed, “the body is back.”
* Relayed during a conversation with Dana DeGiulio.
David Cordero, Chelsea Culp, Stevie Hanley, Isabella Kendrick, Lodos, Mexico City
http://www.lodosgallery.info/peregrineatlodos.html