I’m not wearing a swastika armband （David has cleverly altered the outfit and replaced the swastika with a penis） but I am holding a huge dildo. To this day, I have no idea how he procured this get-up. The boots in the photograph are mine, but he did the rest, down to the surprisingly high-quality blond wig. I’m standing on his neck.
If I recall correctly, his justification for this was a weird narrative about being a Jewish man and reconciling his identity with capitalism pushing the Nazi aesthetic, and fetishising big blond women. Shiksa Goddess is scrawled on the back of the photo in his handwriting.
I remember him getting into an argument with the Israeli girl on our course during the crit, where she just had this massive go at him for co-opting a critique of capitalism and the narratives around internalised anti-Semitism to justify objectifying me, and fetishising the suffering of their people. Or something like that. She also said I should be ashamed of myself for playing along with it, and I remember just being like, well, good art asks these questions, doesn’t it? Because, you know, we still had a Labour government at this point and Obama was in the White House, and that liberal free speech shit went down with a lot less resistance.
I offered to sign prints after the crit, because it’s a fucking good photo. I look sick, honestly. The wig suits me. I stripped out the black hair dye shortly after this with the intention of going blond – but I left it natural.
In a later sketchbook from the same year, I’ve taken a few photos of David mid-coitus; this is harder to execute than you’d expect. Just, like, logistically. I kept dropping the camera, because he just kept fussing and moving and whining. I’ve definitely captured the physical and emotional discomfort of the situation, but it doesn’t quite work. I think what I like most in this set are the close-ups. I have a photo of his hand wrapped up in my ugly Ikea bedsheets, and one of his eyes scrunched up really tightly.
Notes under the photos read: promise of fucking works better than actual fucking tbh.
And then he kept pestering me to do it again, which bewildered me for about two weeks until he completely fucked up our relationship, which was very platonic, by the way. From my perspective, at least. I just thought we were two artists who’d clicked professionally. But boys ruin everything, don’t they? Everything has to be this When Harry Met Sally bullshit, where sex always gets in the way.
We were on the bus together, me and David, and he’s talking about this party his friend is having, and she’s freaked out about the amount of people coming to her flat, and has suddenly said that all plus ones are cancelled. He was recounting the conversation, ‘And I said to her, can my girlfriend not even come?’ And I was on the bus thinking, hmm, I wonder who his girlfriend is? I asked him. He laughed.
And then I could practically hear the Kill Bill sirens going off in my head because he meant me. He thinks I’m his girlfriend. I must have made a face, because he went from laughing to not, and flushed bright red. I got off the bus.
Some lass who fancied him in our year ended up having this big go at me for it in the middle of the studios, while he was standing behind her telling her to leave it, and I sat there, let her finish, then smacked her.
This effectively blacklisted me for about six months at uni. The lass didn’t even complain, but I went from like hot, edgy, novelty-northern girl to weird, fighty, state school chav. This idea of me permeated the whole course – I was having tutors referencing my difficult background, and I kept having to correct them.
I drop David’s mid-fuck close-ups in the folder as well. They’re interesting failures, and very embarrassing for him, if nothing else.
My phone buzzes in the kitchen. I let it ring out, then go and collect it. It’s Flo again. I don’t ring her back, but I pick up her texts. She’s all apologies, and panic, threatening to come to the house if I don’t pick up in the next five minutes. I tell her to calm down, and that I just slept for twenty-four hours straight. She replies, whatever happens, you’re my best friend, and I love you. But then she asks if I’m sure about what happened last night.
The fuck do u mean am I sure
You know how you sometimes fill in the gaps?
Because i feel like we both know you do that
And sometimes when you embarrass yourself/get blackout you do like to blame other people??
Especially me???
Oh my god go fuck yourself lmfaoooooo
She doesn’t reply after that. I go back to the box. I don’t have the strength to speak to Will yet – the number by his name keeps ticking up and up.
I pick up another workbook, containing a number of photos of boys on my course （taken before the blacklisting） which don’t quite work, but they’re what I ended up putting together for Barely Legal. Nighties, glossed lips, a lot of pink. The aesthetically pleasing, retro, pastel erotica stuff with skinny, androgynous boys, selected for being both skinny and androgynous. At the time it felt revolutionary, but everything does when you’re twenty. They’re silly. If you were going to take the piss out of my work, and people who make work like mine, you’d make these photos. The proper prints are rolled up in a small poster tube in the box, which I’ll go through another day with gloves and hands that aren’t shaking quite as badly.
This is how I booked my first solo show over that summer, however. I put those up for our end of year show, and Anne Werner asked for my details, and rang a week later to offer me a solo show. She owned this little gallery in Peckham （The Werner Gallery, her own house with the ground floor converted into a gallery space）， not huge, but it got me some attention, got me pegged as one to watch in a couple of little art magazines.
The show was in November. Anne wanted more work than I had, so she gave me the summer to produce something new for it, but my well of models had dried up. Flo kept trying to get me to photograph her, and I’d gone well off photographing women. I gave her this big spiel about the problem of the female form in visual culture, how it was impossible to divorce or protect it from the male gaze in the context of the western art world, yada yada yada.
My phone continues to light up insistently. There are notifications from social – Finch has uploaded some pictures from last night – but it’s mostly fucking Will. Will, Will, will you pay attention to me?
I pick up my phone with the intention of blocking his number. I read the texts instead, my thumbs overtaken with a toxic curiosity.
I let you BORROW my clothes because you were covered in sick :/
He insisted, yesterday afternoon. 12:32. But when I picked my top up off his floor in the morning, there wasn’t any sick on it. Not even sick that had been wiped, or washed off. It was clean.
At 13:04:
Hey sorry for the tone of that last message, i get that must have been weird to wakeup in my clothes and probably not remember why. Sorry
At 14:18:
Hey do you remember much about last night?? Stuff got pretty intense haha
Sorry if i seemed like i got the hump about you and Henson as well. If you fancy him that’s cool! He’s a handsome chap haha
That scots charm haha. He asked me for your number but I’m not giving it over bc you know privacy and consent and shit
At 14:36:
I mean I just sort of thought you were coming over for me but i obviously misread the situation and it’s fine so sorry for being weird