Katya Grokhovsky, 2010, SummerEnd of Summer TA-ship. Last overwhelming critique of final photo projects and I am in teacher mode. Satisfied and head ached, yet what a joy to impart wisdom to younger minds. My Lap-Top has decided to commit half-suicide and I took it, weeping silently, to its parents, Apple. I am waiting and have found myself, in panic-mode. How long has it been, since I did not have a laptop attached to my hip? Dinosaurs were seemingly alive. My phone is no IPhone either and I am left with a strange forgotten electronically dependant nothingness. I have become at my own disposal. Now, I have to drag myself over to school's labs and library to check up on mostly unnecessary emails and to waste some precious summer hours on FB. I admit to this.
However, this has been a curse and a blessing in slightly veiled disguise. I spent Saturday Night Reading. yes. Reading a big fat book by Camille Paglia, Sexual personae - Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. It made me hungry, horny, and absolutely intrigued and wanting More. And there is More. It is a big book, as stated previously. I like big Books and I cannot lie. I do. The end isn't near and the pleasure is prolonged. My book lust has been awakened once again, and I found myself lazily and lustfully wondering over to bookshops. Skimming titles, I buy Absurdistan and Kafka on the shore ...and an over-sized September issue of American Vogue. Ah, pleasure here we go. I'm half down into Absurdistan already. Hungry constantly. Brain craves fuel. But let me caress thee and sing to Vogue.
The satisfaction of new glossy shiny untouched and virgin Vogue has been my life-long forbidden pleasure and spending luxury. I luuuve it. Somehow, I permit myself this particular vice and never-ending Vogues pile up wherever I am, only to be left behind to new loving owners or deposited in parents' garage, in dusty rotting mountains of decaying splendour. Talk about Decadence and its' disease of the eye. Perhaps. yet, as I open and sniff the perfumed pages, here Gucci, here Prada, here Yves Saint Laurent, nothing exists. Only the end will be near, soon enough. The newness of the new, the promise of love? Coming from troubled waters of my fashion background, all this isn't surprising, but its persistence well into my art life is, if a little embarrassing to admit to my artist peers. I buy Vogue. Italian mostly, occasionally American and Australian, sometimes French. I am Vogaholic and I am proud of It. Is there a cure? I'd like to think not. Magazines have long been discussed as objects of desire par excellence in themselves, and that is partly true, of course, but it is what they contain that leaves me with some sort of magically enhanced endorphins, floating about my over-excited blood.
I Vogue- page- shop in my mind. I imagine my glossy sleek heroines as myself, adapted and reshaped, better versions of myself, more glamorous, groomed, aloof, less human, less and more woman, less fragile, less emotional, more sophisticated. I imagine all this, as images flood my imagination, I float on a cloud of mixed perfumed scents and labels. The designer names are whispered in soft French lace and silkiest baby pig leather into my ears. I am almost ready to pray. I lust and hunger and want . How politely incorrect. I'd like to hate this, but I do not.
My taste for decadent disarray and accumulation of beautiful things has always been there, even if I vigorously deny it in cleaning sprees and tornadoes and sometimes very minimal held back mode in my practice. But it is precisely that, just barely holding back the curtain of absolute avalanche of madness and beauty and desire, that I work with and sometime release, sometime strap tight, sometime destroy and start afresh.
TO Vogue, Pleasure and pain of non-attainment.
