For Lee Lozano

The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.
--Walter Benjamin, from "The Destructive Character"

Where’d you go, Lee?

There are performances and then there are performances

Like art was always speculation

Like this was a speculation

On how to be a self

A woman, how to be a woman

To stop circulating

In anything but your present

Would resist art’s alibi

Like the self was the last thing

You could quit

Last form of capital

Boycotting your self

In the 70s everyone became a punk

Because identity was the last thing one could destroy (faced with the world’s destruction)

To unmake the image of everything, everyone

To do this through image-making

Then destruction itself became a means of identity

How to locate art’s destructive character?

Because you wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would…

Because you hardly have anything in common...

The name keeps changing, its appearance in a flux riven

The series of names that you were

Every name in her story

Those airless spaces where you continued being born

Motherless except for one letter

All that was left

An exchange of lack withdrawn by a lack of exchange

Like Andrew found all of Hannah’s books and effects thrown to the curb after she died

Death is only the beginning of the artist’s ‘career’

The artist is not present

Or if they are, the discourse is trashed

Question: what is the difference between abjection and dejection and rejection?

Answer: a prefix.

Answer: a different way to destroy.