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?
--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An exchange of lack withdrawn by a lack of exchange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.
