University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Through a violet lens: looking at holes, cuts and fragments in material, poetry, and performance

(USC Thesis Other)

Through a violet lens: looking at holes, cuts and fragments in material, poetry, and performance

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content Through a Violet Lens
Looking at Holes, Cuts and Fragments in Material, Poetry, and Performance

by

Lainey Racah

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(FINE ARTS)

May 2022

Copyright 2022 Lainey Racah
ii
Epigraph

I don’t like metaphor, but things lie next to each other pretty nicely, especially in real life.
– Eileen Myles, “Heat,” 1998

Hole theory explains nothing
This is in order to create
A platform from which
To engage everything.

– Pope.L, Hole Theory, 2002

iii
Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to my committee members:
Chair: Andy Campbell
Amelia Jones
Patty Chang
Keith Mayerson

and everyone–USC faculty, peers and classmates, visiting artists and scholars, and loved ones–
who I’ve been in dialogue with during this MFA program and from whom I’ve been privileged
to receive guidance and support. A very special acknowledgement to my wife Paola for her
incredibly deep and loving support.

iv

Table of Contents

Epigraph………….…………………………………………………………………………....ii

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………....iii

Table of Contents………….…………………………………………………………………..iv

List of Figures……….………………………………………………………………………...v

Abstract………………….…………………………………………………………………….vi

Preface……………………………………………….……………………………………......vii

Introduction……..………………………………………………………………………….....1

Chapter 1/ Cycles, Plastic, and Sponge-Walking…………………………...………………...2
Chapter 2/ Missing Parts: The Reparative Whole/Hole…………..…………………………...7
Chapter 3/ Deep Study: Camouflage………………………………………………………….9

Chapter 4/ Sun-Faded Holes: Neutered Camo………………………………………………..16

Chapter 5/ Digging into Hole Theory………………………………………………………....18

Chapter 6/ Ecodeviance: Pope.L X CAConrad ………………………………………………24

Chapter 7/ The Hole As Fertile: Proposal for a Violet Mound (Lesbian Spit)………………..27

Chapter 8/ Debris………………………………………………………………………….......29

Conclusion ……………………………………………….……………………………...........30

Figures……………………………………………….……………………………………......33

Bibliography……….……………………………….……………………………………...….41

v

List of Figures

1. Some of the poems from CAConrad’s Shard series: their look on the page and as a series
(2021)…………………………………………………………………………………………..33
2. The CAConrad poem “4 Shard” (2021) part of the poet’s Shard series…………………….34
3a. Sponge-walking performance, first iteration, fall 2021, in the IFT parking lot……………35
3b. Sponge-walking performance, second iteration, fall 2021, on Factory Place……………...36
4. Traces / imprints from the first sponge-walking performance, Fall 2021...………….….…..37
5. A painting from the Camo Cuts series, acrylic on canvas, 2021….……...…………....……38
6. The cover of Hole Theory by Pope.L (2002) …...…………………………………………..39
7. Pippi washing her floors: a still from the 1990s cartoon TV series adaptation of the 1945
book Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren………………………………………………….39
8. Camo Cuts: Sun-Faded (detail), sun–faded cotton, 2021…………………………………...40

vi

Abstract

This thesis explores, through the analysis of queer artist writings and poetry, an interest in holes,
cuts and fragments as conceptual, processual, and material markers in my research and practice.
This writing clarifies my interests and connections to my own processes, works, and concepts as
a poet and artist making work informed by process, action, and fluidity.

vii

Preface

A SHORT EXCERPT FROM A PERFORMANCE LECTURE ON HOLES & CAMOUFLAGE
[Personal stories and exposition alternated with excerpts from a handbook for kids about
camouflage in nature–performed while painting gesso on camo netting live in Patty Chang’s
performance studio class Fall 2021.]

Have you heard the joke about the student who turned in a blank sheet of white paper for his art
project? His teacher asked him how he could call that art. “It’s not a blank sheet of white
paper,” he replied. “It’s a polar bear in a snowstorm.”

Camouflage comes in many forms. Some animals have permanent color patterns that help them
to hide. Others have color patterns that change with the seasons. Still others have color patterns
that change with the surface the animal is on. And still others use patterns that change during
different stages of life.
1

Every summer between my undergraduate years, I worked as an arts & crafts teacher at
a reform Jewish summer camp in Yosemite. Since the location of the camp was pretty remote,
and the camp was very hippie, the staff spent a lot of our free time between our teaching blocks
skinny dipping in the river that ran along the border of the camp. Sometimes we would “rock
hop,” hopping from rock to rock down the river as a more direct way than hiking to reach prime
swimming spots. One day, rock hopping down the river with some friends, I suddenly couldn’t lift
one of my feet. Thinking it was stuck between two rocks, I hesitated to look down for a moment,
wanting to continue forward. When I did look down after a moment, simultaneously my foot

1
Freed, Camouflage.

viii
finally broke free. Immediately I noticed two wet puncture holes on my ankle with little streams
of bright red blood running out of them. A snakebite. My foot hadn’t been stuck in a rocky
crevice but pinned down by a snake’s fangs. The creature had somehow completely escaped my
eyes. I will never know what kind of snake (water or land) it was or what it looked like among
those rocks. All I know is that it was either nonvenomous or didn’t release its venom, because the
only medical care I received that day, after hiking almost thirty minutes back to camp, was a
washing and bandaging of the wound and I was fine. “Am I going to be okay though?” I
anxiously kept asking the nurse, who responded, “Yes, your foot is just filthy.”
There was something about being naked in the mountains that had made me feel one with
nature--blending in--up until then, as if I wasn’t trespassing or interrupting wildlife as I tromped
through the river, ungainly and big as Godzilla to some small creatures. Having my body
actually punctured by something invisible brought on a deep fear in me; that despite my youthful
hubris, I was not untouchable in the web of life there in the mountains.

Only a few animals have no need for camouflage. These animals may have no natural enemies
and eat plant food that cannot escape. The only threat to these animals comes from humans.
Land animals such as elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses do not need to camouflage
themselves from natural enemies. In the ocean, only certain huge whales that eat plankton have
no need of camouflage. For other animals, camouflage plays an important role in the struggle to
stay alive.
2

Q&A

2
Freed, Camouflage.

ix
Q: How deep is a hole? A: A hole can hold or a hole can go all the way thru
Q: Name as many types of holes as you can think of off the top of your head. A: pin hole sink
hole worm hole water hole man hole blue hole pot hole hole in your argument pie hole hidey
hole blow hole donut hole black hole

Q: How did you camouflage when you were a child? And as an adult? A: Silence; Language

And my last Q, which shall remain in the air or you can take a stab at it: How have you
camouflaged yourself to survive?

1
Introduction/
Holes–literally, figuratively, poetically, psychologically–have quickly become a main
theme in my work and this written thesis. It is through stretching and grappling with this concept
that I have found a way to discuss and draw lines between wide-ranging texts, ideas, and aspects
of my practice. Two main sources of mine are the works of artist Pope.L and poet CAConrad;
each work in multidisciplinary ways, embodying rich practices that are wellsprings of reference,
ritual, and inspiration for this writing.
I am making connections between my process, my work, and my interests in strategies
employed by artists and poets working queerly with emphases on material, time, environment,
and the body. I’m exploring the making, meaning, and relating of holes in writing and art. I raise
many questions about holes, like the potential of holes to be sites of activation or activism, as
representations of absence that avoid a clear politics of representation. I want to examine how I
and others work in contradiction, informed by poetry, and engaging with ideas of absence,
openings, and debris. My thoughts stretch in several different directions, and I hope to create a
varied picture of the different ways in which I’m engaging with making, as both an artist and
theorist. These explorations also attend to my parallel practice as a poet, a mode which engages
the same way of thinking and researching queerly–with my queer lens, prioritizing fluidity, and
twisting conventional use of material and ground–but using language. From this point of view, I
have a particular interest in connecting my work and approaches with makers working in modes
and styles of non-normativeness. Writing about holes, cuts, and fragments in relationship to my
work and research represents my interest in the interstitial, the byproduct, the contradiction. I am
most interested in the oblique and opaque as opposed to the straightforward, clear view of things.
2
Part of the process of writing about my work has been tracing one of the materials of my
most recent body of work: camouflage netting. In working with this material, I was first drawn to
it because of the promise of beautiful dappled sunlight, a shortcut gesture to partial shade. The
materiality of the netting itself has guided the work – the poly-plastic weave, the varying flatness
or curved edges depending on the tension or draping of it, etc. But what is of most importance to
me is the negative space the netting makes.
1
The cuts, the gaps, the openings. The edges and
their shores. The holes.

Chapter 1/ Cycles, Plastic, and Sponge-Walking
We have a strange dependence on plastic, not only because it is a convenient and
ubiquitous material in consumer capitalism, but as a material that stands in for things. Plastic
replaced so many different types of materials–such as animal shell and bone–to such an extent
that we forget the original material that we may have used for some things. Plastic is a substance
so embedded in our lives that it’s now embedded literally in our bodies (microplastics).
2

The plastic I’ve been using to make my recent paintings, in its thinness, its non-
descriptness, in the holes cut in it rendering its use value zero (something cut is a thing
compromised), is actually revealed to be not fulfilling its utilitarian purpose (as a waterproof,
easy and adaptable tablecloth), and is instead transformed into something else. Or, it’s
transformed into nothing; into an embodiment of lack, a thing “of holes,” characterized by its
holes and hole-y-ness. I think in this way the cut plastic tablecloths I’ve used are like how artist

1
Obligatory Carl Andre "a thing is a hole in a thing it is not." (see Rider article in bibliography).
2
Carrington, “Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs,” 2020.
3
Pope.L describes mayonnaise in his work; the material “reveals its lack in a very material way”
too.
3

In the Fall of 2019 I began using more and more water in my paintings, and so I needed
new tools in the studio to mop up the inevitable overflow and flooding. At first, I used old
towels, already in use in my studio as painting rags. A benefit is that these rags are easy to
squeeze out, but they require a lot of surface area to dry, and the studio was beginning to develop
a very wet smell. Then I discovered large yellow sponges–3M’s “Heavy Duty Extra Large
Commercial Sponge,” to be exact. They come individually and precisely wrapped in clear
plastic, perfectly dense with cleanly sharp square edges (unlike the less satisfying versions with
the rounded corners). They are such perfect objects, pristine and whole in contrast to my studio
full of plastic scraps and paint-stained rags, that it took a while for me to unwrap and use them.
Like the towel scraps before them, I now use them over and over in the studio in the making of
poured paintings, including the most recent series with the plastic “screens.” The wrappers have
been used, too, the plastic chopped up into bits and poured into paintings including Net Echo
(2021) and Camo Cuts 1 & 2 (2021). The sponges are used while making paintings that involve a
lot of what I’ve been calling paintwater, or very watered-down acrylic paint, to sponge up the
spilled and leftover paint liquid that spills over the edges of the canvas. I then squeeze this liquid
back into the plastic measuring quart cups, collect it there, and pour it over the canvas again.
This cycle of using and reusing the paint water is repeated until the enough of it has been spread
out and absorbed by the canvas to leave it in position to fully dry.
Related to this process is my sponge-walking performance, which took place in the IFT
parking lot (at the former art graduate building adjacent to USC’s main campus), in which I took

3
Pope.L interviewed by Martha Wilson, BOMB Magazine, 1996.
4
the two large sponges, tying them to bottom of my two feet with a piece of baker’s twine (black
and white striped fiber string). I realized later that I must have been inspired by the wacky and
independent fictional Swedish child Pippi Longstocking.
4
In the story (originally in books by
Astrid Lundgren and later adapted to TV series and films), one of Pippi’s signature moves is that
she floods her floors with soapy water, attaches cleaning brushes directly to her feet like sandals
and washes her floors like an ice skater. It’s an image that stuck with me all through childhood,
and as a kid I remember secretly trying to wedge my foot into the plastic handle of a scrubbing
brush I found in our basement (it didn’t fit). There was something magical about this for me as a
kid, and looking back on it, this was an early example for me of creative resourcefulness. To
come at something from an alternative angle, to find something in doing it in the “wrong way,”
while also using one’s body to make gestures with a sense of freedom and ease, all undoubtedly
stayed with me.
One foot at a time, I dipped the sponged foot into a bowl of water on the ground and let
the sponge saturate fully. When both sponge shoes were fully filled, fully engorged with water, I
began my journey walking across the parking lot from the bike racks to the gate that opens to
30th Street. I stepped gingerly but precisely, determinedly, wanting my prints to remain wet
across the entirety of the parking lot. Anxious that I wouldn’t make it to the fence at the other
end of the lot before the water ran out, my steps became wider apart, as I tried to ration the
liquid. When I reached the end of the lot, I was able to take off the sponges and declare the
action finished. The sponges, through their journey of the performance, picked up all kinds of
dirt, asphalt, chemicals and whatever else on the parking lot ground. All the little pockets and
pits of the sponge index the history of many drivers, walkers, scooter riders, cyclists, and skaters

4
See Figures at the end of the text.
5
who traversed the blacktop. I brought the sponges back to the studio with this residual grime
remaining inside of them. I used them in a painting in the series I’ve been referring to as “Camo
Cuts,” (based on their genesis of being created with plastic cut in homemade camouflage
patterns) incorporating what was left inside the sponges in the painting. Some of the black dirt
and debris mixed with the paint water and ended up getting squeezed out into the canvas. The
ground of the studio gets mixed into some paintings, and here the ground of the performance was
mixed into this painting, which can be seen up close in dark patches of trapped sediment on the
surface of the canvas.
5
These acts, I think, have a relationship with Amelia Jones’ 2015 essay
“Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic “Work,” and New Concepts of Agency,” concepts and
language which I will use throughout this thesis. I find myself drawn to Jones’ description of
“hybrid work,” in which “the materiality of the work is its key site of activity and its
transformation is key to the experience.”
6
She goes on to write, “this hybrid interpretive model
can address in this way the interrelations among thought, action, and materiality for the artist as
well as subsequent experiencers. Such interrelations not only draw out the interpreter’s
awareness of previous physical actions in relation to materialities; they call forth our sensitivity
to the artist’s previous thought processes as connected to choices that resulted in actions
affecting materialities, the signs of which are visible to us in the present as we view the work.”
7

There are certain pieces in the unfolding of my practice that I think of as “hinge” works,
even if they aren’t central to what I share outwardly; the sponge action is one of them. This
action, using the water and sponges, and then re-using the sponges continued to be used in the
making of paintings, has helped me connect many of my interests including cyclicality,

5
See Figures at the end of the text.
6
Amelia Jones, “Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic “Work,” and New Concepts of Agency,” p.20-21.
7
Jones, “Material Traces,” 29.
6
performance, tools, traces, and process. By using the sponge, a tool in my studio, and expanding
its potential by activating it in a different way, I have been able to more closely examine my
moving body as integral to the work. I don’t want the presence of my body, or the idea of a body
in general, hidden from the viewer. I embrace interconnectivity, overlap, contamination: ideas I
am interested in pushing further as I develop my practice. The painting comes out of its
environment, and is not separate from or cleaned of it. This thinking has been inspired a bit by
reading some of Mel Y. Chen’s writing in their book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering,
and Queer Affect. They write, “affect is something not necessarily corporeal…it potentially
engages many bodies at once, rather than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single
body.”
8
I’m connecting this to ideas of performance and how it affects the performer, the viewer,
and the materials used in an artwork after the action. Once used, imbued with energy, or acted
upon, a material or artwork changes–like a book read cover-to-cover, or a performer’s prop and
costume. I’m extending Chen’s proposal beyond multiple bodies to art, proposing that the
materials and tools used to make the art all hold an affective energy.
The sponge-walking performance was reperformed in the parking lot / alleyway (Factory
Place) behind the current graduate art studios. This space was far more public: it is a cramped
and busy thoroughfare from Sixth Street through to Alameda Street that runs past multiple
businesses including a shooting range and a rock climbing gym. This time I walked with the
sponges down one length and came back to my starting point, leaving a doubled set of wet
sponge prints. Again, I saved the debris that the sponges sucked out of the asphalt and squeezed
it all over the next painting I made in the studio.

8
Chen, Animacies, 11.
7
Chapter 2/ Missing Parts: The Reparative Whole/Hole
After reading Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of
Cancer by Lana Lin, I’m beginning to think that my fixation on holes and my attempts to
connect the materiality of plastic to the body, makes sense in a way. Learning more about
psychoanalysis, in particular descriptions of the object and the lost object–the fetish and the
reparative–gives more dimension to my exploration of the relationship between material and self.
So is reading loss written in different registers, as in Lin’s chapter on Audre Lorde’s texts on
cancer from The Cancer Journals and Kleinian psychoanalysis. Through studying Lorde’s poetry
and life, Lin observes that “poetry can resuscitate life against the deadening rhetoric of
mainstream media and public opinion. Lorde puts herself on the side of poetry as a reparative
salve.”
9
Lin dedicated each chapter in Freud’s Jaw to thinking in depth about the impact of
cancer on three main subjects: Audre Lorde, Sigmund Freud, and Eve K. Sedgwick. Lin explores
the personal, individual impact of cancer, but she also describes how these subjects’ experiences
changed the ways in which they wrote and related to readers and people in their communities.
Lin describes the Kleinian concept of the reparative as “the creative and constructive
forces that one harnesses to repair damage to one’s internal psychic objects.”
10
This text has
helped me make sense of the body, my body, and anxieties surrounding ideas of loss or missing
parts--to make sense of the fact that what Lin describes as “loss and bodily disruption” is
another, complicated kind of hole.
11
Lin writes that cancer “not only complicates the ideal of
wholeness...but it also unveils the unwanted knowledge that from the outset we have never been
entirely whole...in short, cancer shows the hole in the whole.”
12
Holes can denote something

9
Lin, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects, p.79
10
Lin, Freud’s Jaw, p.3
11
Lin, Freud’s Jaw, p.1
12
Lin, Freud’s Jaw, p.2
8
missing but also make room for something else. Audre Lorde’s activism as a Black lesbian, Lin
making meaning and sharing it thru the legacy of her writing--both are transforming a kind of
subtraction into a multiplication of “imagination,” and “social action,” as Pope.L might put it
based on some of his writing in Hole Theory, which I will be discussing alongside my
understandings of Lin’s texts.
13

I had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Lin as she was a visitor to the USC graduate seminar
“Readings In Cultural Studies,” led by Dr. Dorinne Kondo. Dr. Lin spoke of her activism as
temporally different from those on the front lines; an activism that takes time and reflection and
manifests in writing and film. In the aforementioned chapter in Lin’s book, as she puts together
Klein’s ideas with Audre Lorde’s work, specifically The Cancer Journals, “Lorde’s notion of
mothering involves claiming the parts of oneself that society would throw away, a project that
enlists community support.”
14
She underscores how Lorde’s experience with cancer, losing parts
of her identity and body, drives her further into her activism and sense of collectivity. One of
Lorde’s ways of connecting women in action and empowerment around breast cancer was to
urge them to educate themselves in methods of early detection, such as self-examination, and
knowledge of the compounding environmental factors that can lead to cancer. Another topic she
wrote of with the aim to change shame-filled perception and optics around breast cancer was her
rejection and criticism of prostheses: “I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind
lambswool or silicone gel.”
15
For Lorde, she did not want the holes made in her body to become
her personal burden, and did not believe that was right. She repeatedly pointed outward from
herself–to capitalist roots of cancer and to those who profited off of it–in order to disrupt the

13
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, p.84.
14
Lin, Freud’s Jaw, 56.
15
Lorde, The Cancer Journals, p.61.
9
accepted narrative that the cancer patient must be camouflaged, made acceptable to the general
public and hushed. Lorde believed that her approach should be shared widely: “If we are to
translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then
the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.”
16
With holes
visible to each other, we can bind in strength and solidarity and move toward a kind of
wholeness together.
As Jones writes in her “Material Traces” essay, “making and experiencing art are always
social, dialogical practices, always in process and taking place over time.”
17
This is clear in
Lorde’s writings as she blurs the line between her art and activism, and how these writings reach
forward through time with potent influence, continuing to do the work of galvanizing and
empowering. The form of The Cancer Journals–dated journal entries that progress in time
through her cancer experience and speeches that exist richly decades later–highlights how time
and process informs her art. Pope.L’s annotated and marked-up Hole Theory is another version
of this, shifting and vibrating over time with the artist’s growth, but also a text for fluid
interpretation since its publication.

Chapter 3/ Deep Study: Camouflage
Pinning the camouflage netting to the white studio wall (a cousin of the white gallery
wall, at least in its usual initial smooth whiteness), and painting it with a white gesso that slowly
made the material blend into the wall, made me think about how my project was related to the
history of the “white cube” and its criticisms. As art critic Brian O’Doherty writes in his 1976

16
Lorde, p.62.
17
Jones, 29.
10
book Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, “A gallery is constructed along
laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come
in…walls are painted white.”
18
If white is “invisible” and default, and the white cube especially
is still thought of as the most neutral backdrop for artwork; assumed to not only not interfere
with the work but to provide an ideal environment, what happens when painting the material
with primer is a large part of what transforms it into the art? Is it reifying the white cube, or is it
lessening its power? Is it funny, and if so, when? Is it camouflaging the white cube of the
gallery? O’Doherty continues: “Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial–the space is devoted to the
technology of esthetics.”
19

Through reading and writing poetry I have come to appreciate fragments and pauses,
silence and absences, providing an analogue or parallel for my own artistic (and poetic) practice.
Camouflage exists, arguably, as a type of hole that I have been studying with great interest. Not
just because there are cuts in the material, but because of how the material is made to be used.
For predators. To hunt, to fish, to lie in wait undetected, unseen, becoming part of the landscape.
Abbott H. Thayer, an artist and naturalist working in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century,
wrote in his 1903 text “Protective Coloration in its Relation to Mimicry, Common Warning
Colors, and Sexual Selection”: “we cannot doubt that most animals wear on their coats pictures
of their habitat...we see how completely such patterns...do help to obliterate a partridge, grouse,
woodcock, hare, or any other of almost all the species in every order; since they prove to be
actual animated pictures of their environment.”
20
Thayer’s word choices are interesting in their
emphasis on presence, absence, and duplication. His is a painter’s eye, and he makes sense of his

18
O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 15.
19
O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, 15.
20
Thayer, Protective coloration, 554.
11
observations in nature with a painter’s vocabulary. In fact, he opens the text by writing in clear
acknowledgement of his credentials: “It seems necessary to establish the artist’s claim to be the
judge of all matters of visibility, and the effect, upon the mind, of all patterns, designs, and
colours...An artist reads design wherever it occurs, just as a composer reads a score...Nature has
evolved actual Art on the bodies of animals, and only an artist can read it.”
21
In Thayer’s text,
artists are the ideal interpreters of the natural world. The animals disappear into the landscape,
but does the viewer as well?
Thayer’s text was written shortly after moving pictures, the precursor to film as we know
it, were invented in the 1880s. Relating the patterns on animals to “animated pictures,” then,
seems a fairly-modern and forward-thinking way of describing physiological camouflage for that
time period. The moment that is even more intriguing in this passage, though, is the use of the
word “obliterate.” Here there is a sense of violence, action, totality; the usual definition of the
word meaning to wipe out, erase, destroy.
22
Upon further research, though, the word has a
technical usage in pathology and biology: “To fill or close up (a vessel, cavity, or passage) with
inflammatory or fibrous tissue; to cause to disappear by such a process.”
23
This definition is
additive rather than subtractive, like how a camouflage pattern is used. It also relates the verb to
holes, filling holes in order to make them disappear.
I like this winding path of searching for meaning because it brings us back to the body.
This is a key part of my practice: looking for connections across genres. Again, I think of both
the camouflaged body and the one the camo is affecting–the viewer in the field–and what
happens to them. It kind of reminds me of finding a hiding place as a child and trying to figure

21
Ibid., 553-554.
22
Oxford English Dictionary, obliterate, v.
23
Oxford English Dictionary, obliterate, v. #3
12
out if I could watch the seeker while remaining concealed, or if my lack of a sight line equaled
theirs. How do we understand visibility–or invisibility–from multiple perspectives?
If a hole can be lack, and if camouflage invisibilizes (or at least conceals from vision by
deleting a figure from a landscape), then camouflage can be thought of as a sort of hole. Like
crossing the street wearing all black clothing at very late hours, becoming part of the night.
Coming across those dressed this way as she was driving at night my mother used to yelp “Do
you have a death wish!” as she leaned into the car brakes. As a child I noted her mix of fear and
frustration at the moving blind spot in the road.
I came to Thayer from José Esteban Muñoz’s chapter “Just Like Heaven,” from Cruising
Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. In this text Muñoz briefly refers to the naturalist
via his engagement with Jim Hodges and his use of camouflage patterns in his work: “[his]
mention of Thayer and the origins of camouflage separate it from militarism.”
24
Hodges states
that “camouflage is a rendering of nature...a manmade depiction of nature by the artist Abbott
Thayer.”
25
This art and nature relationship makes Muñoz recalibrate his negative feelings about
camouflage and even explore its role, along with ornament, in his idea of “a queer aesthetic
dimension”: “The linkage between nature and the ornament is compelling when considering the
refusal of a certain natural order.”
26
Muñoz concludes that the ornamental works he discusses in
the essay can function as portals (another kind of hole) for change: “Silver clouds, swirls of
camouflage, mirrors, a stack of white sheets of paper, and painted flowers are passports allowing
us entry to a utopian path, a route that should lead us to heaven or, better yet, to something just
like it.”
27

24
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 132
25
Ibid.
26
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 132.
27
Ibid., 146.
13
Camouflage netting has become the root of much of my work. The genesis of these works
is light, or holes, or light passing through holes. All are important. For some reason, I want to tell
the body of work like a story. I don’t know if that is useful here. The netting came from
inspiration from an artist who designs gardens. I saw a photograph of it and wanted the same
dappled light in my yard. I asked her what it was and she said “camo netting.” I typed that into a
browser search bar and ordered some online. I thought I’d selected a pretty sage green color but
when it arrived in the mail it had the sort of “classic” organic meld of jungle camo colors –two
deep greens, brown, black. Suddenly, in my mind, it was not an aesthetic tool for harnessing
immaterial droplets of light, but reverted back to its original state as a prop adjacent to violence;
something unfamiliar and weirdly charged. I took it into the studio. I decided to paint it with
white gesso. Maybe it will become a painting, I thought. Or a ground for a painting. I wanted to
cover the camo print but also create new potential. I pinned it to the white walls. The jungle
colors were steadily swallowed up over the course of several weeks. When one side was totally
painted, I unpinned it, flipped it over, and painted all the jungle camo that was left. The wall
behind the netting was left with a textured pattern from the holes in the material that looked
almost like scales. A record of the holes and their nature; how they were open on both ends and
allowed material passage.
Eventually, the question came up in studio visits of how the netting was made and
whether I had cut the pattern myself. “No, it’s prefabricated,” I would respond, to which my
visitor would ask, but what if you cut your own netting? I went to Youtube and looked up DIY
camo netting tutorials. I learned some folding and cutting techniques and tried it on an available
material in the studio, a plastic tablecloth I had made paintings on in the past. This particular
tablecloth was a large circle for a round table, and vibrantly blue. The cuts broke up the solid,
14
machine-made circle shape and transformed the piece into something that almost felt like art, but
after staring at it pinned to the wall for a while, I knew that wasn’t it. There needed to be another
step in its transformation.
I think of these handmade pieces as having “camo cuts.” This phrase is important because
it brings together image and action. I make the camo cuts. After I cut the plastic cloth, I unfurl it
and place it directly onto the primed canvas. Then I pour the paint over and through it. I take
care, over the span of half an hour or so, to tip the canvas side to side on all sides gently to get
the paint to rush over the whole surface. After some of it has spilled over the sides (which I often
sponge up and squeeze back out onto the canvas) and some of it has been absorbed into the
canvas and maybe some has evaporated, I let it settle horizontally on the ground. I leave it to dry
without touching it at all for about four days. I don’t want the surface to be wet or even slightly
slick when I peel the plastic off. When it’s fully dry, the plastic is adhered quite well to the
surface. It peels off in one piece but there is a bit of resistance as I tug on it, and makes a
satisfyingly crispy sound as it gets peeled.
What’s left is a memory, a trace of the material. When I use the cut pieces with paint
against the canvas, I almost feel as if I am making portraits of the material. The image is a whole
with holes, with cuts. The painting is like a whole imprinted indexical mark of a hole-y object.
The gaps make the netting what it is. By putting this material through this process, I propose that
the shapes made by cutting are simultaneously marks and holes.
Amelia Jones writes in her “Material Traces” essay about the idea of traces, which she
defines as coming from “new complex art experiences that are performative yet exist in various
material forms.”
28
This has been helpful for the way I think about my work before, during, and

28
Jones, “Material Traces,” p.20.
15
after its making: “this exploration connects the making of objects with the processual nature of
performance...I engage with objects as themselves in process and more importantly as indicating
previous processes of making or what I call the having been made of the work of art.”
29
This
piece was written in relation to both performance art and works bearing indexical marks–a term I
was first introduced to in classes on modernist art when I was an undergraduate student--or what
Jones refers to as “material traces.” Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art,
a 2013 show in a Montréal gallery curated by Jones, is cited here as a rich site of examination
along these lines. The show included works of varying mediums that she viewed as having ties to
time, gesture, and materiality. The significance of my body and the actions and gestures I make
during the process of making my work is in dialogue with these ideas. For example, one of the
works she discusses in the piece is the artist Cassils’ Becoming an Image (2013), in which the
artist full-body punches two thousand pounds of clay, illuminated only by a photographer’s
camera flash. The piece exists as the performance, the images taken of the performance, and the
beaten mass of clay, which is simply titled “After.”
30
Jones wrote of the work, “what interests me
is…the performativity of the remains of the action (in particular the lump of clay) and the way in
which the project as a whole interrogates the interrelation between action and materiality.”
31
Like
Cassils and the other artists Jones writes about in the essay, I am making work that consists of
the traces of its process.
These concepts connect to Pope.L’s Hole Theory as well. Throughout his work and
writing Pope.L understands art as tied to bodily action, far from static. In the text, he describes a

29
Jones, “Material Traces,” p.22-23.
30
Jones, “Material Traces,” p.21.
31
Jones, “Material Traces,” p.20.
16
memory of his college art teacher, Leon DeLeeuw, demonstrating his theories of art by
embodying them:
He’d stand at the center of the room.
(even if it wasn’t the center)
And he’d wave his arm around
…
Holding a big humongous paint brush
Filled with tons of paint
Which flew every which way
Convincing everything
For fifty yards with its splatter.
32

While this demonstration was more about marking than holes and cuts, it showed the centrality
of the body and action highlighted, instead of emphasizing the final product of an artwork, as
many art teachers do. It was also a way of showing how chance is a part of process-based and
performance-related work, which is a key element of my work: creating conditions, going
through actions, and then letting the water, paint, and plastic finally settle however it will.

Chapter 4/ Sun-Faded Holes: Neutered Camo
The first iteration of the sun-faded camo fabric piece is finished.
33
I bought a four-color
camo fabric, and then I chose one color to excise from the pattern. I chose the lightest color; a
grey-beige color, leaving the reds and black. Using an Xacto knife and watching the shapes

32
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, 77.
33
See Figures at the end of the text.
17
steadily disappear from the pattern, changing it so that it was decidedly not camo anymore, made
me start to think of the action as a neutering of the camouflage. By cutting out/off, I was
rendering the strategy of camouflage useless or inactive–and, like Pope.L, tying my art to bodily
action. The process of cutting out each grey shape was painstakingly slow and difficult. Each
camo shape is quite irregular, with tiny curves and surprisingly sharp edges that are hard to
notice from afar. The pattern is more complicated than it first seems (this is in line with its
original model, nature). After cutting out a few dozen grey shapes and putting them aside, which
formed its own strange mass of semi-recognizable blobs, I laid the fabric over a whole (uncut)
piece of fabric in a nice shade of blue (maybe would read as “sky blue”). After speaking with the
guy who worked at the discount fabric warehouse and doing some initial small-scale
material/process tests, I determined that watered down lemon juice applied directly to the blue
fabric would catalyze a sun-fading process. I laid both fabrics out on a table in the sun and used a
spray bottle to spray into the cut-out holes, and a paintbrush to make sure the liquid was applied
well and up to the edges of the cuts. Then, time and the sun were left to do the rest of the work.
After a few weeks, the shapes were faded / bleached into the blue, representing the place that the
grey camo shape had had in the four-color pattern. The result, with soft liquid edges of the
lightened shapes, actually appears to mimic a cloud filled sky (a soft, smeary cloud filled sky).
The end result is almost like a reverse-camouflage–it breaks the pattern and singles out part of it,
making it visible, legible, un-obliterating. This kind of process-based, chemical (or alchemical?)
transformation type of work has a legacy in works such as Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings
from the late 1970s.
34
Warhol’s series, which arises out of experiments with cum and piss on
traditionally-prepared canvases, utilized copper paint as a ground onto which he and invited

34
Wolfe, Artland article.
18
guests would piss upon oxidizing with time and creating a quite beautiful range of light and deep
greens. Though his paintings did not utilize pattern or stencil as in the Sun-Faded piece, the
focus on material transformation as central to the work is there in both.

Chapter 5/ Digging into Hole Theory
With a great interest in material but also in process, it has been helpful to think
performatively, to frame my practice with the body and action in mind. Pope.L is a conceptual
artist who has deeply delved into both material and performance throughout his practice. A
powerful example of this for me is his performance in which he slathered mayonnaise all over
his body.
35
Using an everyday material, time, and his body, he is able to think through many
concepts around race, class, social constructs, and process. Pope.L connects this material,
factory-produced mayonnaise, to evoke racial codings and psychological structures: “The longer
[mayonnaise] remains, the more transparent it becomes...For me, mayonnaise is a bogus
whiteness. It reveals its lack in a very material way...Mayonnaise was a very useful and fresh
way for me to get out of this dead end: whiteness constructs blackness.”
36
The idea of using
metaphors gathered from an everyday substance like this is quite effective, because it serves to
show that the concepts come from the everyday, they are around us all the time even in the most
mundane of contexts.
He speaks of working “poetically” and in “contradictions,” both of which I see as
relatable and useful modes.
37
There is an allowance for transformation and translation in those

35
The performance was part of How Much Is That Nigger in the Window (1991) at Franklin Furnace in New York
City; see Artforum article in bibliography.
36
Pope.L interviewed by Martha Wilson in Bomb Mag, April 1996.
37
Ibid.
19
modes. In his 2002 text Hole Theory, a sort of playful but theoretical manifesto on holes or the
idea of the hole, Pope.L explored in these modes, making declarations and conjuring strong
images just to question them in the same line. The process is recorded temporally, as well;
handwritten revisions and additions are visible to the reader, such as on the cover with “May
2001” crossed out and replaced with “January 2002.”
38
It is immediately clear to the reader that
this piece has a relationship with time and change, and furthermore, that the artist believes that
underscoring the evolution, mutability and even fallibility of the piece is just as important as the
content itself. Beyond the cover, there are cross-outs, stickers, drawings, arrows drawn, and
copious handwritten annotations. The text is written in a hybrid format, caught between an
outline, a poem, and a script–which is fitting given his background in theater and playwriting.
This form, along with the strong artist’s voice formulating the ideas through time, ties it to
performance art. So, thinking performatively, I gravitate to the moment in Hole Theory of
imagining holes as occasions or durations:

6. So–when I say
Holes are conduits or as a ‘means to’
Or a space or an intersection–
I mean holes are occasions–
Opportunities which can take
Many forms, materials, and durations
(imagine a hole that is only duration).
39

38
See Figures at the end of the text.
39
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, 80.
20
Holes as occasions or durations are rich thoughts to expand on. A hole as an opportunity: a
prompt for the artist. Can a hole be a space for a question–or a problem–to be formulated for an
artist? A hole can be considered as a space for potential, to be projected into in a generative way.
With camouflage netting, the holes are what allow for the material to be activated into their
desired usage. They are a “means to” attain confusion, obscurity, trickery.
With “a hole that is only duration,” Pope.L has got me thinking of holes in relation to
space and time. What can we learn from thinking this way? Is a performance a hole that is only
duration? Henri Bergson, a French philosopher from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century studied in theater and performance studies, has a theory of duration or la durée.
Bergson’s idea of duration includes an image of two spools representing a subjective experience
of the passage of time; one unrolling as we feel time elapsing and the other rolling up as our
memory accumulates.
40
Combining this idea with Pope.L’s text, I conjure an image of a
“durational” hole stretching out forever, in ceaseless motion and constantly redefined. When
Pope.L prompts us to imagine such a thing, it seems like an exercise in expanding one’s
imagination to its outer limits. Perhaps the whole point of Hole Theory is to twist and bend
meaning in your mind and practice until you think fundamentally differently and you are
changed. This text has helped me understand “theorize” as an action verb. Amelia Jones applies
time to her thoughts on artworks that have both performative and material elements: “I am
interested in hybrid works…[that]...produce effects and affects after the moment of their initial
manipulation (or more accurately, the infinite moments of their manipulation, since things take
time to produce and exist through time).”
41
With this, in the context of artist writing like

40
Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” p.187-237.
41
Jones, “Material Traces,” p.23.
21
Pope.L’s and what I am trying to do here, the idea of a durational hole could be what one of
these hybrid works is or a space for one to exist; a site for “material traces.”
In his text, Pope.L also wrote “Hole Theory is/Theory in process engaging/Lack as an
ongoing interaction.”
42
Lack can point to a presence that may have once been there, or can point
to presence that can come. Holes describe. Holes can point to the limits of material. Holes create
new edges, possibility for new movement. If material is punctured, there is potential for
transgression, transformation, intermingling. It was the holes in the camouflage netting material
that served as windows into thinking more about transformation for me. Again and again, Pope.L
insists that his theory is for those with imagination, as he writes, “[b]ack to insisting:/I could
insist that the foundation/Of Hole Theory is the imagination” and, bringing things into
connection with the material world. But it runs even deeper. Pope.L: “Social action gives the
imagination/A reason to get up in the morning.”
43
Though the text is abstract and strange, the
artist makes a case for abstraction and strangeness coexisting right along with the everyday, the
material, and the lived experience.
Thinking about holes, it only makes sense to also think more about the terms of visibility.
This is something that I’ve considered frequently as a queer artist working with camouflage
related materials and moves.

5.1 Typically what cannot be seen
Is what we most like to see.
Longing is my favorite
Material for engaging (not picturing,

42
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, 84.
43
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, 84.
22
Not illustrating) holes.
44

“What cannot be seen/is what we most like to see” makes me think of queer visibility,
both in its problems and gloriousness - and also in its impossibility. There is, quite commonly
today, a yearning for queer people to be “seen,” (to each other, and to the larger world, though
these are of course different) even as we acknowledge that there is no one queer look or
presentation. Thinking of this, and the glimmers of feeling fully “seen” that shine through every
once in a while for an individual, “what cannot be seen,” is a beautiful thought. Something
invisible, indescribable, or untranslatable. This is an example of an idea expressed through
contradiction that begets richness and complexity, something that feels alchemical in nature.
Pope.L’s commitment to negation and contradiction is a strategy of transformation and meaning-
making.
What he writes next, that longing as a material–what does that mean? Longing is
certainly related to duration - not only in the core part of the word (long) but as something that
can only form through the passage of time. If holes are engaged with, per the artist, rather than
“picturing” or “illustrating,” they are activated via the body in some way. Pope.L is no stranger
to considering duration and site activation. Catherine Wood writes in her book Performance in
Contemporary Art of eRacism, his series of durational crawls, that this work is “a feat of
endurance that involves pain and duration…[it] activates a much wider urban context…Pope.L’s
actions represent a situated form of body art.”
45
Are his acts a kind of hole that rips through these
many intersections (“a constellation of vectors,” as Wood puts it)?
46
Are his acts a performance

44
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, p.80.
45
Wood, Performance in Contemporary Art,p. 76.
46
Wood, Performance in Contemporary Art,p. 76.
23
of longing, his presence as the material of longing? He did, after all, write, “I don’t picture the
hole / I inhabit it.”
47
Engaging with something rather than illustrating it is a performance art
approach, or illustrating it with the body, which is more like engaging (or embodying).
Pope.L continues, embracing contradiction and the duality of materiality/immateriality:

9. Hole Theory was built
To house nothing.
Its rooms are filled with
The anxiousness of everything.
48

Thinking of an everything/nothing dichotomy set up here reminds me of Nut, the Ancient
Egyptian goddess of sky and space; a representation of all space including interstitial space.
49
By
assigning a figure who stands for everything in between, there is an acknowledgement that the
things and places we think of as “something” and “nothing” are not so clear-cut. Is Pope.L’s
“anxiousness of everything” the anxiousness of the potential of anything? Anxiousness brings us
back down to earth, to the human psyche and body. Anxiety is all about the potential future, a
fraught relationship with time. Thinking in relationship to time brings us back to performance.
What are the “rooms” referred to here? Writing in conversation with poetry, rooms are a
poem’s stanzas (Italian for “room”). Perhaps Pope.L’s Hole Theory is referring to itself here.
Housing nothing and everything, the stanzas’ boundaries are in question, are even porous.
Porosity could be another way of thinking about potential; the holes of the sponge ready to soak

47
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, p.77
48
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, Hole Theory, p.82.
49
Piankoff, “The Sky-Goddess Nut and the Night Journey of the Sun.”
24
in, ready to engage fluid. This is how I engage in Hole Theory, filling its pores with my own
meaning and content, and wringing it out again and again.

Chapter 6/ Ecodeviance: Pope.L X CAConrad
With Pope.L’s insistence on imagination and social change in Hole Theory, I also can’t
help but want to try to think of holes as facilitating physical and social connection. In his essay
“Queer Theory and the Specter of Materialism” as part of Social Text’s “Left of Queer” issue
Petrus Liu writes, “instead of the primacy of the economic, Marx’s materialism demonstrates the
ethical imbrication of the self and Other.”
50
Because I am working with prefabricated materials,
and thinking about labor in process, reading more recent understandings of Marx, especially
those issuing from queer theory and performance theory, frames my work appropriately within in
a larger context. Amelia Jones includes Marx in her “Material Traces” essay as well: “I cite
Marx strategically...I intend to stress the interrelations among processes of labor or making and
the materialities (including humans) transformed through these processes.”
51
This is another
angle of considering the body as a material, enduring, transforming, and being transformed
through process, material, and context. So, did I become transformed in creating or
deconstructing the camouflage patterns? If so, how?
On one of the pages opposite the typed text of Hole Theory, Pope.L addresses his study
and writing of holes as a direct consequence of his life experience. In handwriting, with multiple
cross-outs and what looks like a patch of yellow paint, he writes:

50
Liu, Left of Queer, 40.
51
Jones, Material Traces, p.22.
25
I am interested in holes because I have been wounded by absence. Marked by trauma, I
have a choice: either be ruled by circumstance or be circumstance and tap the energy of
predicament; make it my pet, my posey; my theory–no remorsey.
Underneath this message is a drawing of a flower with orange petals and green leaves with a
drawn arrow to it labeled “posey.”
52

Negative space, gaps, breathing room, are important on the page. For some poetry it is
everything. I want to liken words on the page to fragments, or cuts into the meat of the page,
which makes me consider poetry as ancient slabs of language, each character dug into, cut out,
more than a mark. Poetry has the potential to remind us that language can be a tool. Poets can
use it to hew the page into a poem, or to build a tool in the form of the poem. What I mean by
this is that the poem can be material or tool, either or both.
CAConrad is a queer, radical, political poet born in 1966. They use the space of the page
uniquely; often their poems look jagged, shaped like shards ripped into the middle of the page.
Poetry is steeped in convention, canon, history; yet CAConrad’s way of using the page and their
words is transformative, active, and political. In addition to their writing, they have developed
what they’ve named “somatic rituals'' as a way of connecting the physical self in the public
world to the usually private practices of generating ideas and artmaking. One exercise from their
book Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, an instructional prompt for writing a
poem named “Grave A Hole / As Dream A Hole,” includes instructions to dig a hole and bury a
crystal in it, then sleep in the hole together with the crystal and share dreams with it. They write,
“[t]his transgressive act, putting a crystal BACK into Earth, I mean imagine someone taking a
bone from your FOOT or below your heart, then putting it back for the night!! Sick, but also

52
Pope.L, ed. Bessire, p.83.
26
quite beautiful to permit ourselves this.''
53
Here, the hole is a site for reparative healing and
reconnection. Activating the hole by filling it with their body and the crystal, they make new
meaning. Using the hole as a transformative sort of portal is meant to lead to the creation of
poetry.
Their newer poetry series, referred to on their Instagram page as chronologically
numbered “Shards,” pushes the poet’s already strong emphasis on the shape of the poem on the
page. Their poems usually appear intentionally shaped; like shadows of objects or tilting
columns. Zoomed out, these newer poems look like jagged shards of glass against the white
backdrop of a word processing document.
54
As they accumulate CAConrad’s Instagram grid, the
effect is expanded. We tend to group poems by a time in a poet’s life, so it can be assumed that
they are of the same body of work as they come out. So, even with their irregular shape, they are
related, shards of a larger broken thing. The shard poems begin and end seemingly in the middle
of a breath, all written in lowercase letters with almost zero punctuation. This puts extra burden
on the line breaks and word choices for meaning. The content itself, each poem like a short blink
opening into the poet’s mind, is then like a fragment of a larger whole. Is the shard poem a piece
of something shattered or is it a hole in material (the fabric of the world?); an interruption in a
larger pattern? The negative space is as much a part of the poem as the text: inhales and exhales.
CAConrad engages holes, types of absences, cuts, and as seen in the somatic rituals, often brings
the body into it. In “4 Shard,” lines of text in a skinny shard with multiple gentle curves and a
couple of long pieces sticking out, the piece ends with the lines “the cave/we forge/of
one/another.”
55
In this tiny moment, there is a collapse of body and self with an intimate other.

53
CAConrad, Ecodeviance, 136.
54
See Figures at the end of the text.
55
See Figures at the end of the text for the full CAConrad poem.
27
Somehow, CAConrad makes something as loomingly empty--as cavernous--as a cave into a
magical, transformative space. The use of the word “forge,” connects back to skilled making and
material. This brings me back to Pope.L: “The form, material and durational/Aspect of a hole can
affect/Its nature (imagine a hole/That is only aspect or affect).”
56
In a way, he is pondering the
very fragmentaryness of a hole, or of the making of a hole. “Even if I draw a hole. Or build/A
hole. I am not after duplication.”
57
Pope.L acknowledges that a hole has more to do with action
and change than stability; he resists fixedness in his process, including his way of thinking
around the entire subject of the hole. Catherine Wood writes that he “aggravated questions of
racial politics, power hierarchies and age that dug deep into the broader issue of civic
conformity.”
58
This resistance to a stable definition, to conformity, to a predictable way forward,
feels like a queer approach. It is this approach that, at first without knowing, brought me to link
the works and processes of CAConrad and Pope.L and attempt to put them directly in each
other’s company here.

Chapter 7/ The Hole As Fertile: Proposal for a Violet Mound (Lesbian Spit)
The origin of violets as queer symbols, for lesbianism specifically, comes largely from
the repeated mention of them in Sappho’s poetry, which only exists now in fragments.
59
In one
of these fragments Sappho described “violet-weaving Muses,” in another, she wrote, “by my side
you wove many garlands of violets…delicate necklaces…such as a king might use you poured

56
Pope.L, ed. Bassire, Hole Theory, p.80.
57
Ibid., 82.
58
Wood, Performance in Contemporary Art, p.77.
59
Mendelsohn, “Girl, Interrupted.”
28
on your body.”
60
The relationship of flowers with sexuality, and flowers with the female form is
familiar, especially in an erotic sense. In the context of lesbian symbolism, it seems that violets
have an expanded meaning, and one that has endured over thousands of years.
For a new sculpture I propose to invite lesbians to spit into a hole that a violet seed is
being planted in, to water it with something that can only come from inside of them. All together,
each violet will accumulate into a larger mound of violets all growing together, all grown from
lesbian spit. This idea came from thinking about inherent value, that one is born with something
valuable in the world. This specific value is queer; distanced from heteronormative, gendered
and capitalist rubrics. The gesture of offering one’s spit to grow a seed is a small ritual of
creating beauty, future, and nature while creating a sense of being directly implicated.
Collectively, the gestures become something valuable in itself–a poetic representation of
connection, collectivity, and visibility. Ideally, this would be a large public artwork in the form
of a sprawling mound or hillside. Once established, the perennial flower would be able to reseed
itself and continue to bloom in cycles without heavy maintenance. New seeds could be planted
by new waves of people as well. Both factors would result in the work being in a constant state
of flux, representing all cycles of growth and multiple generations at the same site. As part of my
thesis exhibition, this project will still be at a micro-scale, with a small number of seeds planted
by lesbians in my direct circles and with the hopes that the initial participants would reach out in
an expanding social web to bring more planters to contribute.
61

60
Storer, “Poems & Fragments of Sappho.”
61
Unfortunate update: the first round of violet sprouts died because of the deadly combination of a last minute trip
out of town, surprise winter heat wave, and a sick partner unable to water them. A second round of violet seeds have
since been planted and have yet to sprout.
29
Chapter 8/ Debris
In thinking through my use of what I’ve been calling “debris,” or all the plastic and dirt
from the studio floor, and thinking about incorporating what touches the floor or ground into the
process of what is being made in the same space, I’ve wanted to think more deeply about the
impulse. In a conversation during a studio visit with madison moore in September 2021, they
recommended I read Martin F. Manalansan IV’s essay “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives: Mess,
Migration, and Queer Lives.” moore pointed to the act of using the floor dirt and debris in my
work as being a kind of archiving. The Manalansan piece focuses on a household of immigrant
queer residents and the “disarrangement” of their living situation.
62
Manalansan explores ideas of
value, ephemera, and the idea of a queer archive: “The significance of ephemeral evidence...its
worth is about how it embodies the fleeting, nomadic, messy, and elusive experiences and
processes of self-making (and, I may add, history making).”
63
This, and with of course José
Esteban Muñoz’s idea of “ephemera as evidence,” upholds the value in focusing on debris; in
making it central to the work—and especially queer work.
64
My focus on the plastic scraps, or
the residue from the parking lot ground as in the sponge walking performance, is coming from
wanting to recognize that these are what makes the work what it is, makes it whole somehow,
and connected to the everyday reality of living and what we leave behind as we move through
the world. Remembering debris, to me, is remembering time and change and highlighting them
as important–actually essential–to my work. It is a queer archiving, as moore pointed to, not only
because of my queer body enacting it and my queer lens on the entire process, but because it
privileges what is in flux, fluid, and other.

62
Manalansan, The “Stuff” of Archives, p.94
63
Manalansan, The “Stuff” of Archives, 105.
64
Muñoz’s 1996 essay
30
Conclusion
Pope.L said in a 1996 interview with Martha Wilson for Bomb Magazine, “I want the
visual to be more physical.”
65
This idea has resonated deeply with me in my practice and the
process of writing more thoroughly about it than ever before, in this thesis. Thinking through the
relationship between the physical and visual is important for me as I seek to have an increasingly
holistic practice, working across mediums and in varying modes with through-lines of concept,
source materials, and feeling. Part of this means staying away from thinking of paintings or
works on canvases as one dimensional or just visual and not physical; that they have the potential
to have a similar presence to my installations and sculpture. It also means connecting all of my
works strongly conceptually but also materially. Finally, by using the work “physical,” Pope.L
invokes the body. My work, like the works of Pope.L and poet CAConrad as I previously
described, is informed by the body, action, and the physical world. Even as abstraction can
provide some space for the mind to wander and escape, my goal is for my work to
simultaneously be grounded in the material realities of the world.
In a related exercise to think about the body, materiality, and poetry, I wrote a poem
about my relationship to Monique Wittig’s book The Lesbian Body (1973). I used punctuation as
a way to connect to Wittig’s use of the slash ( / ) to split subjectivity in her text (in French, “j/e,”
and in English, an italicized I).
66
Each choice of punctuation in the piece is charged with
meaning: symbolic of the text and my relationship to it and giving playful direction to the reader,
dropping hints and innuendo. I also experiment with using footnotes as a kind of punctuation,
leading the reader back and forth up and down the page as they read, while creating an
opportunity to jut in bits and pieces of the original text by Wittig throughout. The text has been a

65
Pope.L, Bomb Magazine interview, 1996.
66
See Appendix for poem.
31
primary source for me in the process of writing, thinking, and working: of calling up the
physical, the fiery, and the strange while making a queer proposition for new definitions of
“lesbian.” I conclude my thoughts here with an example of my own wrangling of holes, cuts and
fragments in the process of thinking through my work and my sources of inspiration and
influence:

[An experimental poem/essay using play with punctuation to think about the split subjectivity in
the text.]

“Unnameable one you buzz in m/y ears”
67

– How much a slash could do – can do – a lean / heavenly tilt / I stack them up ///// looking for
my meaning / and entry: retrograde
68
\ those bodies \ in 1973 France \ well ces corps until \ ’75 \
that period. \ transformation, boomers come of age \ ok come forward
69
and we’ll start again /
Monique knew what she was doing / splitting, y|e|s, but also pointing forward /// / / / / /
generation Z vlogging on lez gender / engenders annoying hope / subjectivity slashed multiply /
a breaking down of self put back together thru / a selfie
70
/ possession and dispossession / I feel
both from Wittig / through visceral recitation / meaty / someone
71
said it spoke to the
/sensate/un-languageable/ aspects of her work / her seventies feminist references suddenly
juicier / I love academics rendered wordless / and the plump undersides of concept / naked
poolside photos and heavy mind maps / no one in the department is a “man,” Monique, what
does it mean / woefully my body’s been absent [tired
72
and used up] but the text grabbed it back /

67
Wittig, The Lesbian Body, p.46
68
“But in the secret privacy of m/y body I hear a soft and furious growling, your name pervades and elates m/e,
given that you m/y dearest one retain and harbour m/e within you I live for ever in the memory of the centuries, so
be it.” (Wittig 133)
69
“THE GAIT THE WRITHING THE RUNNING THE LEAPS THE BOUNDS THE RETREATS THE
GESTICULATION” (Wittig 141).
70
“You lie on the sea, you enter m/e by the eyes, you arrive in the air I breathe, I summon you to show yourself, I
solicit you to emerge from this non-presence which engulfs you” (Wittig 36).
71
shh, not telling who.
72
“I fall into a deep sleep, I fall into a well full of perfumes, m/y lids are before m/y eyes, I fall into a somnolence
where m/y memory fails” (Wittig 138).
32
the all-caps sections aggressively grounding / I get it / bodies enter each other, a remedy for
panic
73
/ we are material, clearly: “THE PELVIS THE SACRUM THE COCCYX”
74
/ I’ll know
you she says / every granule and pixel –

73
“You speak of the colour of m/y organs” (Wittig 38).
74
Wittig, The Lesbian Body, p.115.
33
Figures:

Figure 1. Some of the poems from CAConrad’s Shard series: their look on the page and as a
series (2021).
34

Figure 2. The CAConrad poem “4 Shard” (2021) part of the poet’s Shard series.

35

Figure 3a. Sponge-walking performance, first iteration, fall 2021, in the IFT parking lot.
36

Figure 3b. Sponge-walking performance, second iteration, fall 2021, on Factory Place.

37

Figure 4. Traces / imprints from the first sponge-walking performance, Fall 2021.
38

Figure 5. A painting from the Camo Cuts series, acrylic on canvas, 2021.

39

Figure 6. The cover of Hole Theory by Pope.L (2002).

Figure 7. Pippi washing her floors: a still from the 1990s cartoon TV series adaptation of the
1945 book Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren.

40

Figure 8. Camo Cuts: Sun-Faded (detail), sun–faded cotton, 2021.

41
Bibliography

Bergson, Henri. “An Introduction to Metaphysics.” In The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle
L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946.

CAConrad, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness. Seattle: Wave Books, 2014.

Carrington, Damian. “Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs.” The Guardian
(August 17, 2020). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/aug/17/microplastic-
particles-discovered-in-human-organs

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2012.

Dean, Aria. “The Trickster Art of Pope.L Draws Power From Negation.” Art in America,
November 20, 2019. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/popel-moma-whitney-
anti-institution-1202667899/.

Freed, Kira. Camouflage. www.readinga-z.com.

Jones, Amelia. Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic “Work,” and New Concepts of Agency.
TDR/The Drama Review 2015; 59: 4 (228), 18–35.

Jones, Amelia, ed. Sexuality: Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press,
2014.

Lin, Lana. Freud’s Jaw and other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer.
Fordham University Press, 2017.

Liu, Petrus. Queer Theory and the Specter of Materialism. Social Text 1 December 2020; 38 (4
(145)): 25–47.

Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals (Special Edition). San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1980.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Girl, Interrupted: Who was Sappho?” The New Yorker (March 9, 2015).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then And There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press,
2009.

42
Myles, Eileen. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. South Pasadena:
Semiotext(e), 2009.

O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. San Francisco: The
Lapis Press, 1976.

Alexander Piankoff. “The Sky-Goddess Nut and the Night Journey of the Sun.” The Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology 20, no. 1/2 (1934): 57–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/3855003.

Pope.L, William. “Hole Theory, Parts: Four & Five.” In The Friendliest Black Artist in America,
edited by Mark H.C. Bessire, 76-86. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002.

Pope.L, William, “Hole Theory: Parts Four & Five.” In Sexuality: Documents of Contemporary
Art, edited by Amelia Jones, 195-199. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014.

Pope.L, William. “William Pope.L by Martha Wilson,” interview by Martha Wilson, Bomb
Magazine issue #55, April 1, 1996. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/william-pope-l/

Soboleva, Ksenia M. “The Queer Feminist Agenda of Wilder Alison’s Abstract Wool Paintings.”
Hyperallergic, November 29, 2021. https://hyperallergic.com/695053/the-queer-feminist-agenda-
of-wilder-alisons-abstract-wool-paintings/

Storer, Edward. Poems and Fragments of Sappho, translated by Edward Storer; from The Poet’s
Translation Series, Second Set, No. 2; London: The Egoist LTD, 1919; pp. 11-22.
https://elfinspell.com/ClassicalTexts/Poetry/AnyteOfTegea-Sappho/Storer-Sappho.html

Thayer, Abbott H. Protective Coloration in its relation to Mimicry, Common Warning Colours,
and Sexual Selection [From the Transactions of the Entomological Society of London, December
24th, 1903] Harvard University Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy

Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

Wolfe, Shira. Stories of Iconic Artworks: Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings.
https://magazine.artland.com/stories-of-iconic-artworks-andy-warhols-oxidation-paintings/

Wood, Catherine. Performance in Contemporary Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2018.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis explores, through the analysis of queer artist writings and poetry, an interest in holes, cuts and fragments as conceptual, processual, and material markers in my research and practice. This writing clarifies my interests and connections to my own processes, works, and concepts as a poet and artist making work informed by process, action, and fluidity.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Looking to the past: closeted feelings of queer longing and desire

PDF

Materials: an intersection of art and science

PDF

Performative futurity: transmuting the canon through the work of Rafa Esparza

PDF

Quilting bodies: the Gee's Bend Quilters, Sanford Biggers, and Jonathan VanDyke

PDF

SpaceTime travelers: on riding a bike in the city

PDF

Blackness and belonging: the impact of Brockman Gallery and the Underground Museum on Los Angeles Art and Culture

PDF

crab explores its wound

PDF

Performativity of sites of commemoration and performativity at sites of commemoration

PDF

Ableism in the U.S. art context: curators, art museums, and the non-normative body

PDF

Art collaborations in fashion brand spaces

PDF

What I learned from 28 years of drawing (from) whatever

PDF

Pushing design limits: expanding boundaries of graphic design

PDF

What’s the wig deal?: Exploring the use of wigs and head accessories in queer performance

PDF

Unruly desires and capacious subversions: Coco Ono’s conceptual burlesques

PDF

Porous bodies: contemporary art's use of the osmotic as a means of reconfiguring subjectivity

PDF

LatinX excess: from the Baroque to rasquachismo, tracing a culture of extravagance

PDF

Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom

PDF

Cao Fei: rethinking spatial dynamics discourse

PDF

Dancing about architecture: performative interrogations of the body in the built environment

PDF

The myth of memory: interpretations of site, memory, and erasure in Los Angeles.

Asset Metadata

Creator Racah, Lainey (author)

Core Title Through a violet lens: looking at holes, cuts and fragments in material, poetry, and performance

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 04/13/2022

Defense Date 05/13/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archives,Art,art practice,conceptual art,contemporary art,Fragments,Gay,holes,interdisciplinary art,Lesbian,LGBT archives,material traces,materiality,OAI-PMH Harvest,Painting,Performance,poetry,process,queer,queer visibility,Violets

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Campbell, Andy (committee chair), Chang, Patty (committee member), Jones , Amelia (committee member), Mayerson, Keith (committee member)

Creator Email lainey.racah@gmail.com,racah@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC110939610

Unique identifier UC110939610

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Racah, Lainey

Type texts

Source 20220413-usctheses-batch-923 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu