Dream

“I guess looking back I had already seen the Hannah Wilke image some time before and I found it almost perverse because I feel I am such a weird kind of male person and then this gesture of labor seemed almost ironic or incongruous, but also people could mistake it for triumphant masculinity and if anything it’s triumphant because I managed to hold up a shovel above my head without falling. Maybe Hannah had a weird relationship with that broom and womanhood and I have/had a weird relationship with that shovel and manhood…” – SMW.

“I want to be like a tree, a flower, the sky, clouds, etc. grass.” – SMW.

“My mom is more of a thinker/feeler. Social things and relationships, thoughtfulness and attention to these seem priorities.” – SMW.

“Actually moving my body to clean etc. feels difficult, arduous, scary even. When I was growing up my dad cleaned more than my mom I think, which had various reasons very particular to our family. My dad is a retired blue collar worker and he never shied away from doing things with his hands. Getting dirty and greasy etc. Hard labor. It seemed meditative to him.” – SMW.

“I guess I found it ironic to hold up that shovel, because it's something I would hardly ever use in real life, and it felt like James Broughton being very seventies and Harry Hay and the Radical Faeries being out there naked in nature (I have to be aware of males before me who tried this format like NYC artist Sean Landers in the 90s, I think his series was even called ‘Naked in Nature’ but for him it seemed much more a confrontation and not a melting in).” – SMW.

“One of my favourite pictures is the one of you holding the shovel. It seems that you are claiming something-is that the case?” – AC. “There is this amazing picture of artist Hannah Wilke holding a broom in this fashion in her kitchen topless. I suppose I was trying to ape this image. I am not one for hard labor actually, I just want to be a big ball of energy kind of slip sliding around and thinking and feeling.” – SMW.

“I always say I want to be like nature to women’s culture, instead of that old chestnut, ‘women are nature, men are culture’ things are way more complex than this (starting with the fact that there is more than just women and men and spectrums and continuums must be taken account of). But yes, I want to be part of nature and that in relation to women’s culture, which I understand to be in the best sense more of a symbiosis with the world and planet and not a confrontation…” – SMW.