Henrik Olesen. Ingles

HENRIK OLESEN
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2 HENRIK OLESEN HEY ASYMMETRY!

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Since starting out in the late 1990s, Henrik Olesen has The idea of the experience of displacement as a
developed a conceptually rigorous and highly critical transformative opening-up, the critique of the traditional
artistic practice that examines how normative models of notion of authorship, and the reflection on the possibility
gender, sexuality, the body, and identity are constructed of activating narrative and representational devices that
and legitimized, and that at the same time explores the are not subject to rational logic and that can contribute
possibility of producing representations and discourses to expanding the boundaries of what can be thought
that question the binary logic on which these models and said, are just some of the themes that run through
are based. the latest stage of Henrik Olesen’s career.
Influenced by both French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The exhibition organized by the Museo Reina Sofía is
analysis of power and by queer theory and its ideas on the Danish artist’s first solo show in Spain and offers
the cultural nature of sexual identities and orientations, an opportunity to explore his major works. It also
in his work Olesen highlights the key role that spaces presents a series of architectural interventions that
of knowledge and socialization of various kinds (from Olesen—who has participated in international events
the legal/criminal system to the medical/clinical such as the Bienal de São Paulo (2016) and Manifesta
discourse, by way of the art world and the family as 10 (2014)—has conceived and produced specifically for
institution) have played in the evolution, expansion, the museum’s spaces.
and normalization of the pressure placed upon those
who do not conform to the prevailing dichotomous To accompany the show, this catalogue presents texts by
standards. the exhibition’s curator Helena Tatay and by Lars Bang
Larsen, Paul B. Preciado, and Dodie Bellamy, which
This investigative exercise takes shape through the provide keys to understanding the main principles of
creation of installations, collages, and architectural the complex, multifaceted artistic and discursive project
interventions in which Olesen—often using everyday undertaken by Henrik Olesen.
objects (milk cartons, tins of food, items of clothing,
medicine boxes, wooden laths, etcetera) and choosing a
deliberately austere form of presentation—incorporates
and interweaves a vast web of artistic, literary, political,
philosophical, and historical references.
Aware that the struggle for discursive power is linked

to visibility, Olesen chooses to introduce an openly gay
perspective in areas where it has traditionally been
forbidden, showing that the suppression and repression
of homosexuality is omnipresent in the history of Western
culture.
In his works made since the mid-2000s, Olesen strives

to go further in his efforts to denounce and make visible
the dynamics of silencing generated by the normalizing
action of the system. Adopting the performative drive
of the queer movement as a connecting principle in
his practice, his works draw attention to the need to
produce ourselves as open subjectivities in a constant
JOSÉ GUIRAO CABRERA
state of change and redefinition. Minister of Culture and Sport

In his essay Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the It should be noted in this regard—as the exhibition’s
Prison, French philosopher Michel Foucault argued curator Helena Tatay points out—that what lies behind
that contemporary power is not external to us, but Olesen’s efforts to organically integrate the discourse
rather something we have internalized: it shapes us as of others into his own discourse is his desire—in the
subjects and—through mechanisms of discipline and performative sense that Gilles Deleuze gives the term,
control—determines the conditions of our existence. not as lack but as an instance of the production of the
This idea is central to the work of Henrik Olesen who real—to help dismantle the rational façade of culture
since the late 1990s has carried out a complex program and to facilitate, through this process of dismantling,
of artistic research into how dominant discourses (legal, the emergence of a new body: a queer body, freed from
scientific, academic, and so on) have formed our way of the ties and obligations of the Oedipal subject, that
perceiving, thinking about, and representing the body eludes any attempt at identity closure.
and sexuality. It is an effort that highlights the binary
nature of the knowledge and classification systems of It was with the installation Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork (2008)
modernity, through which, more specifically, he seeks to that the desire to self-produce a queer body (which is
contribute to dismantling the fiction of heteronormativity, to say, an undefined and indefinable body in a constant
revealing its use as a means of imposing and legitimizing state of mutation) began to play a central role in Olesen’s
a social order based on (re)production. work. In earlier projects, such as Some Gay-Lesbian
Artists and/or Artists Relevant to Homo-Social Culture
Olesen’s critical inquiry into the relationship between the Born between c. 1300–1870 (2007), he had carried out
body and sexuality has been formulated through a series heterodox archival research into the representation of
of installations that are hybrid in nature and conceptually homosexuality in the history of art and visual culture,
very dense. While they stand alone as individual works, drawing attention to the rich diversity of images generated
these installations are closely interconnected, as though around it before the modern normative discourse on
they were open-ended chapters of a narrative under sex was fixed in the late nineteenth century. But with
constant construction and reconfiguration. In them, Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, he went one step further. As
almost by way of a programmatic declaration, Olesen Tatay explains, by staging his break with the family—as
uses poor materials and everyday objects, and opts for the social and economic matrix of the capitalist system
a deliberately sober mise-en-scène, removed from the of production and reproduction—Olesen suggests that
temptations of spectacle. This allows him to question in order to complete the process of breaking free from
the idea of good craftsmanship associated with artistic the symbolic order of the “law of the father” without
practice, highlighting the ongoing centrality of the establishing new authority figures in its place, it is not
auratic desire in art. sufficient to construct a new self. Instead, accepting that
there can be no return to an original identity, we must
Based on the premise that any process of cultural become bodies without organs, mutant, liquid, and so
construction is a metabolic process, Olesen uses a broad forth, openly confronting our essential vulnerability.
range of references (political, historical, philosophical,
artistic, and so on) in his projects, a diversity of voices The potential and possibility—not so utopian these
that he presents and organizes without apparent narrative days—of (self-)producing ourselves as a body without
logic, leaving it up to the viewer to provide (or not) organs are also at the center of Olesen’s works on English
meaning. It is a method that, as Ariane Müller reminds mathematician Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of modern
us, we can associate with Robert Walser’s modus operandi computing. The tragic story of this British scientist,
in his novella The Walk; or perhaps, more obviously, who committed suicide after being prosecuted for his
with Aby Warburg’s seminal deconstructive operation homosexuality and being forced to undergo aggressive
in the Mnemosyne Atlas, which breaks with binary logic experimental hormone therapy (which, among other
and combines the personal and the historiographical. things, made him grow breasts and become impotent),

is a paradigmatic example of the many forms of violence The analysis and deconstructive use of dichotomous
inflicted on non-normative bodies throughout history. contrapositions—inside/outside, positive/negative, male/
Olesen is aware of this, but instead of focusing on his female, transparency/opacity—that have played a key
victim status he opts for a kind of performative rereading role in the discourses of modernity, the idea of the body
of the figure of Turing, whose theoretical research—we as a battleground and site of political and ideological
should not forget—paved the way for the emergence struggles, and the endeavor to create physical and symbolic
of a thinking machine (a posthuman, post-biological interstitial spaces in which nothing is permanently fixed,
body) that has opened up the way we perceive ourselves. are elements that run through Olesen’s oeuvre. They all
Olesen’s rereading is constructed by using and remixing a come together in his 2018 project Hey Panopticon! Hey
diverse range of references, and emphasizes his idea that Asymmetry! for the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, in which
any one body is all bodies and, at the same time, none. similarities between the architecture of the pavilion
and the panoptic design that Foucault analyzed in his
Olesen’s efforts to develop a queer artistic practice aforementioned essay Discipline and Punish—which
that does not merely draw attention to the functioning this installation specifically refers to—allow Olesen to
and perpetuation of the dominant normative models critically examine the relationship between power and
concerning gender, sexuality, and identity but also the gaze: that complex dialectical interplay between
explores ways of constructing representations and observer and observed. It is through this dialectical
webs of significance that go beyond them, gives rise interplay, Olesen suggests, that we should understand
to works like After Dhalgren, St. George & The Dragon, the strategies of concealment/display that, in coded
and Hell. In the first of these, based on the science fiction form, have historically been devised by certain sexual
novel Dhalgren (1975) by American writer Samuel R. subcultures as a way of avoiding the inquisitorial gaze
Delaney, Olesen creates a dark, enigmatic discourse of power.
with strong erotic overtones, through which he seeks to
remodel and expand the codes governing the narrative The great potential of artistic research around how power
and representation of the homosexual imaginary. In is inscribed on bodies—research that is deliberately
St. George & The Dragon, based on the myth of Saint exploratory in nature and may thus sometimes appear
George, and Hell, based on Dante’s descent into the impenetrable—lies in the fact that, as Paul B. Preciado
underworld in the Divine Comedy, Olesen proposes notes, “What is hidden is more important than what
a critical (meta)reflection on the experience of crisis can be seen.” Through his commitment to an expanded
(existential, artistic, and so forth) understood as a space conception of the queer, which takes its analytical and
of both grief and possibility. performative strategies beyond gender and sexuality,
Olesen’s projects highlight the need to bring about a
To some extent, the idea of crisis is also strongly present radical symbolic break with binary thinking, a break
in Rechte Ecken (Straight Corners, 2015), an architectural that will, in the words of Lars Bang Larsen, open us up
intervention in which Olesen recreates the corners of the to a “transformation beyond the subject-form.” Thus,
exhibition space, like minimalist sculptures scattered the point is not to generate new processes of (self-)
on the floor. This operation, which invites visitors to representation, but rather, quoting Preciado once more,
become aware of the invisibility of elements that are to interrupt “the civilizing work” and start to conceive
essential to sustain a system or structure, also allows and construct ourselves as decentered, nonhierarchical
Olesen to talk about his own personal and artistic crisis bodies, as subjectivities in flight that never quite close
(in his work, he has often used the idea of the angle completely.
as a metaphor for himself ) and about the crisis of the
symbolic regime that underpins the art institution,
whose “white walls,” he seems to suggest, could begin
MANUEL BORJA-VILLEL
to fall apart. Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

10 1 ESSAYS
12 An Introduction to the Work of Henrik Olesen
HELENA TATAY
38 We Do Not Dispose of Reliable Criteria… Not Yet

LARS BANG LARSEN
58 A Visit to H.E.N.R.I.K. O.L.E.S.E.N.’s Hall of Fantasy

PAUL B. PRECIADO
62 The Violence of the Image

DODIE BELLAMY

74 2 WORKS
76 HEY PANOPTICON! HEY ASYMMETRY!
Ariane Müller
92 6 OR 7 NEW WORKS
Ariane Müller
106 FORMLESS
116 HOW DO I MAKE MYSELF A BODY?
128 ST. GEORGE & THE DRAGON

John Kelsey
138 DHALGREN
Mark von Schlegell
156 CONVERSATION IN A YES/NO LANDSCAPE

Nikola Dietrich
164 HELL
182 SOME FAGGY GESTURES
190 MR. KNIFE AND MRS. FORK
202 HYSTERICAL MEN

Ariane Müller

1

ESSAYS

HELENA TATAY
An Introduction
to the Work of
Henrik Olesen

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF HENRIK OLESEN 13
“ONE MUST KNOW HOW TO FALL FROM interior/exterior perceptions and their gender associations.
BELOW”1 He used readily available objects and materials from
his daily life: a sweatshirt, photocopies, a shoe, milk
What is Authority? asked Henrik Olesen in the title of cartons with text printed on them—such as “Teaching
his first book,2 a compilation of aspects of his artistic about gender”—and a newspaper tucked under a wall.
practice—artworks, exhibitions, texts—dating from The use of poor materials and the formalization and
1996 to 2001, along with essays by other authors. Like presentation of the works appeared to reject the idea
all his work from that time, this publication obliquely of good praxis, an attitude arising from an artistic
addressed the question posed by the title, revealing practice with a strong critical component and from
connections between politics, discourse, sexuality, and an ideological commitment to reality.
structural violence. In his analysis of power, Michel
Foucault was one of Olesen’s points of departure, and The architectural installations established connections
the table of contents of the French philosopher’s book between architecture, the body, social class, and sexuality.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison3 was “My body, it’s the opposite of a utopia,” said Foucault.4
reproduced in the pages of What is Authority? The idea Our perceptions and desires shape a representation of
that power is not just something we oppose but also the world, especially when they are ignored, silenced, or
forms us as subjects permeates Olesen’s work. excluded. For his 2000 exhibition at rraum in Frankfurt
am Main, Olesen designed a wall that blocked the way
To enter Olesen’s 2000 exhibition at the Helga Maria into the space, and used it to display the pages of his
Klosterfelde gallery in Hamburg, visitors had to step publication Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay
over a small threshold. Pieces of fiberboard and wooden and Lesbian Past, which visitors could also take with
laths had been placed over the architecture of the gallery, them in pamphlet form. A cardboard box contained
creating openings that seemed to reject the bodies of copies of another pamphlet, Social Organization and
spectators. The objects on display in the half-empty Frequency of Homosexual Behavior among some Species
rooms included a photograph of a dog behind bars, of Animals (2000). Olesen’s artworks and publications
and another of a group of teenagers in an industrial explored body/power relationships mediated by legal
setting with the caption: “The total wealth of the top and scientific discourses in order to draw attention
358 billionaires equals the combined income of 45% of to the suppression and repression of homosexuality
the world’s population.” It is a gap that, as we know, has as a pervasive phenomenon in history. He sought to
continued to widen. Another room contained a painted dismantle the fiction of heteronormativity and introduce
radiator, Zentralheizung (Central Heating, 2000), an homosexual history into discourses that usually exclude
object so commonplace that we take it for granted, like it, because, in the end, the struggle for discursive
the skirting boards adorning the rooms, which Olesen power is directly related to visibility. This led him to
used in a series of sculptural works entitled Zwischenstufe appropriate, modify, and add content in works like the
(nach Magnus Hirschfeld) (In-Betweens [after Magnus 2006 collage series Information on Some Gay-Lesbian
Hirschfeld], 1999). Drawing on Hirschfeld’s definition of Artists (or Artists Relevant to Homo-Social Culture)
homosexuality as an intermediate gender, between male in the Format of the Daily Mail, October 17, 2004, in
and female, Olesen played with interstitial spaces, with which he inserted queer culture stories into the pages
1 Francis Picabia, “Spinner,” from Thalassa in the Desert (1940), 3 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison
in Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Eng.: Discipline And Punish: The Birth of
Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
2007), 364.
4 Michel Foucault, “Utopian Body,” trans. Lucia Allais, in
2 Henrik Olesen, What is Authority? (Copenhagen: Pork Salad Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary
Press, 2002). Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006),
229; “Le Corps utopique” is the title of a radio lecture delivered by
Foucault in 1966.

HELENA TATAY
of the conservative tabloid the Daily Mail as though

they were news items: “Cross-Dressing in Colonial
America,” or an article on the work of French painter
Jean-Fréderic Bazille illustrated by the painting Scène
d’été (Summer Scene, 1869), showing a group of men
flirting in a park.
Artistic discourse has been one of Henrik Olesen’s

long-standing areas of research and intervention. He
has made playful, critical versions of works by other
artists—well-known male figures he admires—which
he says is “like choosing what kind of people you belong
to, this is very queer.”5 In 1998, he made Four Pieces
after Sol LeWitt, consisting of three polystyrene cubes,
adhesive tape, and a milk carton. The work referenced
LeWitt’s minimalist sculpture Cubes with Hidden Cubes
(1997), which explores the notion of perception within
a universe of purity, cut off from life. There is a famous
photo of Le Witt’s sculpture taken at Galerie Konrad
Fischer in 1968, and in 2000 Olesen, always alert to
context, exhibited his own Cubes (after Sol LeWitt) at
Klosterfelde gallery in Berlin, a space resembling the
original gallery. He filled the walls of its office with large
prints of Vito Acconci’s performative actions in Three
Adaptation Studies (1970). On the image of Acconci
blindfolded, Olesen wrote, “history is straight + biology
Laws are straight / Sweatshirt, 2000
is straight + laws are straight + schools are straight +
T.V. is straight + authorities are straight + Vito Acconci
is straight e.t.c.”
INSIDE THE SIGHT6
In 2003, Olesen made the series of collages Anthologie

de l’amour sublime (Anthology of Sublime Love),7 in
which he altered and remixed Max Ernst’s collages Une
semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness, 1934) and La
Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman, 1929).
5 Henrik Olesen, conversation with the author, December 2018.
6 The title is taken from the publication by Max Ernst and Paul
Éluard, A l’intérieur de la vue. 8 poèmes visibles (Paris: Pierre
Seghers, 1948).
7 A publication of the same title was issued by the Sprengel

Museum Hannover in 2003.

In his early collages, Ernst used images from words “L’État c’est moi” (I am the State), and the titles
conventional magazines and publications, and of the chapters—mostly taken from Dada or Surrealist
I really admire how he twisted these folkloric poems—like “Ende der Welt by Richard Huelsenbeck,
images into psychoanalytic statements; he created 1916” (End of the World by Richard Huelsenbeck, 1916)
incredibly beautiful imagery that was also very, and Benjamin Péret’s “Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là,
very funny. At the same time, however, they seem 1871” (I don’t eat that bread, 1871), which connects a
to stage a particular sexism. My manipulation homophobic phrase with the year in which, according to
of Ernst’s collages in Anthologie de l’amour Foucault, the term “homosexual” first appeared, Olesen
sublime was a direct examination of Surrealism wove together countless references. Sigmund Freud’s
and homophobia. For example, I appropriated theories, reflected in the collages Abweichungen in
quotes from Benjamin Péret—a poet I admire Bezug auf das Sexualobjekt (Deviations in Respect of
very much, but whom I consider to be deeply the Sexual Object) and Jugendportrait von Sigmund
homophobic. When Péret writes a poem about Freud (Portrait of a Young Man by Sigmund Freud),
André Gide choking on a hammer down his throat, images of capitalism as the man in the iron mask,
in “André Gide’s Conversion” (1936), it is one of references to Germany’s Article 175, which outlawed
the most extreme statements in Surrealism. But homosexual relations between men, and numerous
what does it mean that many of the surrealists industrial landscapes, along with many other references,
were so homophobic? This does not seem to have describe a particular moment in time. As in his earlier
influenced the way we look at their work or how architectural installations Zwischenstufe (nach Magnus
it is shown. I wanted to visualize the conflict— Hirschfeld), Olesen was again evoking the birth of the
one that obviously goes much deeper than just modern discourse on sex—which Foucault placed at
Surrealism—inherent in looking at art history from precisely 1871—with Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
the position of a non-heterosexual male. Such a and Magnus Hirschfeld. In Europe, the definition of
vantage lies somewhere between fascination and homosexuality and the subsequent criminalization of
denial and is infused with masochism.8 homosexuals as sick or deviant (in the period 1870–1905,
according to one of the chapters), took place in a landscape
Olesen’s series did indeed draw attention to the shaped by two factors. On one hand, the mania for
homophobia of the Surrealists (who erroneously classification associated with the scientific spirit of the
sought liberation in the psychoanalytic unconscious Enlightenment, which sought a corresponding abstraction
formatted by Oedipus), but the work is more complex for everything that exists or can be thought; and, on
in that it recounts a period of art and history from a the other, population reform—the grand project of the
gay perspective. Olesen introduced homosexual and modern state—which was implicit in the development
bondage scenes and images by Tom of Finland, but it of the productive forces of capitalism, and not only
was not merely a substitution of homoerotic images. His assigned individuals to a series of spaces (school, factory,
complex, funny, and elaborate reworkings of Max Ernst’s hospital etc.) throughout their lives but also defined and
collages gradually conjure up a scene of homosexuality classified them medically, sexually, and psychologically.
and its subsequent criminalization. As the text on one Thus, during the reformation of the social body, the
of the collages says, “Glückliches Jahrhundert des scientific and medical classification of homosexual
Kapitalismus” (Happy century of capitalism). bodies as sick or deviant helped to legitimize a social
order based on production. Criminalization was not far
From Sex Panic on the first page of the publication, to the behind. In Germany, from 1872 to 1994, Article 175 of
capitalist angel of death (a skull with top hat) with the the Penal Code—which Olesen repeatedly references
8 Nicholas Cullinan, “1000 Words: Henrik Olesen,” Artforum 48,

no. 2 (October 2009).

16
Cast 5, 2011
Installation view/detail: The Master-Slave
Dialectic, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 2011
Rechte Ecke (Straight Corner), 2003 (detail)
Zwischenstufe 5 (nach Magnus Hirschfeld)

(In-Betweens 5 [after Magnus Hirschfeld]),
Installation view: OTTO, Copenhagen, 1999 >
Homosexual Rights Around the World, 2000 >

18 HELENA TATAY
in this work—outlawed homosexual relations between

men. One of the collages shows an angel with a mustache
behind two frightened children, with the following text
printed below:
a dress is not trousers

the father is not the mother
Gentlemen you are under arrest9
In later works, Olesen revisited this period at the

end of the nineteenth century, when scientific, legal,
and philosophical discourses marked and defined
the homosexual body, but he did so from a different
perspective.
For years, in response to the invisibility of gay culture

in the world around him and to an art history in which
homosexuals had been silenced, Olesen collected images
that seemed to him queer. This research gave rise to
a project that took various forms. First, in 2005, the
book Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists Relevant
to Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870,
followed by an installation with the same title later
that year. In 2007 it took its final form in an exhibition
in Zurich:10 seven six-meter-long panels full of images
showing the representation of homosexuality and same-
sex culture in art history and visual culture. The project
as a whole presents a large variety of artists, images,
gestures, and codes, sorted and classified into various
groups and subgroups.
The project pays homage to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne

Atlas, not just in its formal presentation—images
grouped on black panels—but also in the fact that
it sorts and classifies the images according to its
own “grammar,” creating a new atlas: one possible
Zentralheizung (Central Heating), 2000 cartography of homosexual images in the history of
Jugendliche ohne Lehrstelle (Youth Without Education), 2000 art and representation. It is not a scholarly project that
Eingang / Ausgang (Entrance / Exit), 2000 proposes an alternative art history, but an attempt to
(Aufklärung) ([Education]), 2000
Armutsgrenze / Versperrter Durchgang
(Poverty Line / Blocked Entrance), 2000
Installation view: Helga Maria Klosterfelde, Hamburg, 2000 >
Eingang / Ausgang (Entrance / Exit), 2000 9 “Ein Kleid ist Keine Hose / Der Vater ist nicht die Mutter /
Installation view: Helga Maria Klosterfelde, Hamburg, 2000 > Meine Herren sie sind Verhaftet.”
10 Henrik Olesen: Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists

Relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870,
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, 2007.

HELENA TATAY
construct a positive, plural image of gay cultural history.

In Olesen’s words, the project is “first and foremost about
desire, love, and sex. As a starting point, I wanted to
focus on a more positive aspect of sexuality and cultural
patterns, if you can put it that way. I was interested in
homosexual artists and subcultures as such, and less
concerned about the structures that have criminalized
and oppressed them.”11
As the title indicates, in this case Olesen’s research

focused on the period before the word “homosexual”
had binarily fixed sexual terms in reductive, universalist
definitions (that we still use today). As it happens,
around the time of writing (December 2018), the
Museo del Prado published Goya’s papers, including
his love letters to Martín Zapater, the man described
by historian Manuela Mena as Goya’s “loving friend.”
The press immediately reported categorically, “Goya
was gay.” Olesen’s atlas presents the opposite position,
multiplicity: a partial map of the different, diverse,
erotic representations aimed at persons of the same
sex. To explore the various panels is to experience the
Zwischenstufe 5 (nach Magnus
Hirschfeld) (In-Betweens 5 eroticism of some of the images and gestures, and to
[after Magnus Hirschfeld]), 1999
Installation view: OTTO,
enjoy discovering images. There is enormous diversity:
Copenhagen 1999 pleasant scenes, terrible scenes, acts of punishment
Social Organization and and tender gestures, landscapes, interiors, seductive
Frequency of Homosexual
Behavior Among Giraffes, 2000 glances, bondage, sensual aloofness, melancholy, and
a thousand other registers. The entire atlas is a refusal
to homogenize or reduce homosexual experience. And
homosexuality is rich in signs. In response to persecution
and prohibition, many counter-codes of various kinds
were created, in dress, language, gestures, and rituals.
Public and private spaces were also used differently,
giving rise to various subcultures. Olesen’s atlas reflects
the development of a cultural life that challenged the
dominant episteme.
11 Henrik Olesen, “Future Bodies and Gendered Prophecy:

Henrik Olesen,” interview by Luigi Fassi, Mousse Magazine, no. 18
(April–May 2009), http://moussemagazine.it/henrik-olesen-luigi-
fassi-2009/.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK OF HENRIK OLESEN
ANGLE In both cases the works were linked to ritual, magic,

and exorcism. Olesen’s portraits appeared to suggest a
With Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, the installation he made parting ritual, a cultural rite of passage. It was a farewell
for Studio Voltaire in London in 2008, Olesen changed to the family that hinted at toxic or violent relations.
the direction of his work.
What Olesen was leaving behind in “this world, split
On one hand, Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork was a deconstruction in two–doubled in a state of constant disunion, also
of the family as a social and economic matrix of capitalist willing a constant unification.... around which turns
systems of production and reproduction. At the same the entire system of the world maliciously sustained
time, it was a theatrical and poetic staging of this by the most somber organization,” was the family as
renunciation. the model for the reproduction of the social order of
the law of the father, an economic and disciplinary
On entering the half-empty space, visitors saw an system that reproduces the structural violence of its
upright wooden lath on which the words “Portrait of economic relations in family relationships. The idea
my mother” had been clumsily written. Another two was to escape an Oedipal, heteronormative world in
laths screwed into the wall, one with a jam jar on top, which, through the family, the authoritarian structure
made up Portrait of My Father, and a slightly smaller of society extends into the most private inner reaches.
lath displayed diagonally on a different wall was Angle,
with the following text printed on the label: The installation ended with a poem in which Angle
wonders who he is (“I hate to seem inquisitive but could
The child, he is not there. He is but an angle. An you kindly tell me who I am?”) and calls for salvation
angle to come. And there is no angle. And yet it’s (“Lord save me, says I [Apropos reproduction]”). He
precisely this world of Father + Mother which must politely bids his parents farewell, insists that Father +
go away. It is this world, split in two–doubled in a Mother must disappear from this world, says goodbye
state of constant disunion, also willing a constant to parts of his body because “When you will have made
unification.... around which turns the entire system yourself a body without organs, then you are delivered
of the world maliciously sustained by the most from all your automatic reactions and restored to your
somber organization. true freedom.” He asks, “How could this body have been
produced by parents, when by its very nature it is such
A discarded white sock could be seen lying on the floor. eloquent witness of its own self-production?” and ends
A bit further on, a lone cardboard box with a brand by declaring, “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than
name printed on it. Inside, a fork, a knife, and a jar of a drunken Christian.”
Nutella: Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork. In a corner of the
room, somewhat separate from the other works, a large Each line is like a litany. It is thus surprising to discover
branch with the word “Self-production” written on it in that the poem is composed of fragments of texts by other
white letters leaned against the wall. Although it was writers. The title is appropriated from Dada poet René
made of wood like the other “portraits,” the branch Crevel, who wrote “Monsieur Couteau, Mademoiselle
differed in that it retained its natural irregularities. Fourchette.” The first line is taken from Oscar Wilde (“I hate
There was something unsettling about this installation. to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who
I am?”). Several lines are borrowed from the poet Antonin
The pieces of wood used in Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork Artaud: “I don’t believe in father / in mother” and “got no
were leftovers salvaged by Olesen from the setup of the papa-mummy” are from the 1947 poem “Ci-gît” (“Here
previous exhibition at Studio Voltaire. The formal aesthetic Lies”), but there are also many fragments from “Pour en
of the portraits echoed Louise Bourgeois’s Personnages finir avec le jugement de Dieu” (“To Have Done with the
series dating from the 1940s, which evoked tribal art. Judgment of God”), which is reproduced in full in this

22

Institutions / Authority, 2000
Installation view/detail of the exhibition No Swimming,
Kunstverein München, Munich, 2000
AUFKLÄRUNG: § 209 ÖstGB: Strafrechtliche Normen

gegen Homosexualität in Österreich (AUFKLÄRUNG:
§ 209 ÖstGB: Criminal Law Standards Against Homosexuality
in Austria), 2000
Homosexuelle Katze (Gay Cat), 1998
Reconstructions of Nests from Same-Sex Courtships, 2000

Installation view: Momentum Nordic Biennial
for Contemporary Art, Moss (Norway), 2000
Adaptation Study I, 2000

Installation view: Momentum Nordic Biennial
for Contemporary Art, Moss (Norway), 2000
Vito Acconci teaching about gender /

What does this represent?, 2000
History is straight, 2000
Vito Acconci is straight, 2000
Installation view: Galerie Martin Klosterfelde, Berlin, 2000
Kellogg’s, 1999

24 HENRIK OLESEN HELENA TATAY
and other Henrik Olesen exhibition catalogues. “Better

sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian”
is a quote from Moby Dick by Herman Melville—an
icon of gay literature—and “O mother farewell with a
long black shoe” is a line from an Allen Ginsberg poem.
There are also fragments from Dada poet Walter Serner,
and Olesen’s poem ends with “Sonnet du trou du cul”
(“Sonnet to an Asshole”) by Paul Verlaine and Arthur
Rimbaud, followed by an exhortation to “produce your
own body” and a list of body parts. As a postscript, the
Dada poem “Cigarren [elementar]” by Kurt Schwitters.
Olesen brings this plurality of voices into the poem Mr.
Knife and Mrs. Fork not to construct a new self—a concept
loaded with normative meanings—but to self-produce a
new body, a body without organs. An idea approximate
to Jacques Lacan that Olesen included in the margin of
one of his catalogues,12 and returned to in many of his
later works, is key to understanding his process: “The
ego is thus always an inauthentic agency, functioning
to conceal a disturbing lack of unity.” 13 Here we see that
there can be no return to an original identity because,
even in an initial scenario, everything is combination
and mixture. Olesen leaves behind a world of Father +
Mother, but he also realizes that cultural evolution is
a metabolic process. This is why he incorporates the
discourse of others into his own, an attitude shared by
the early twentieth-century Brazilian modernists who
saw the cannibalism of the indigenous population as a
The State vs. Aaron McKinney, 2003 (detail)
Invitation card for the exhibition Hosni Mubarak, Aaron cultural process.14 The Indians ate their enemies to absorb
McKinney, Richmond, Belgrad, Städtisches Museum
Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (Germany), 2003 their energy and power, devouring the other in order to
Untitled, 2017
produce a new body, a body without organs. Indeed, “Better
sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
Like Artaud, like the Dadaists, Olesen seeks to dismantle

the rational façade of culture. He chooses to devour both
because they use a language of rupture that embodies
expression and because they compose literature through
packets of signs that are not tied to the stable regimes of
12 Henrik Olesen: Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, ed. Carla Cugini,
exh. cat. Museum Ludwig Köln (Cologne: Walther König, 2012).
13 Darian Leader and Judy Groves (illus.), Introducing Lacan:

A Graphic Guide (London: Icon, 1995), 48.
14 Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófago,” Revista de

Antropofagia 1, no. 1 (May 1928).

Four Pieces after Sol LeWitt, 1998
Installation view: Galerie Martin
Klosterfelde, Berlin, 2000

26 HELENA TATAY
the linguistic code. Olesen wants to stage his renunciation ended up committing suicide by eating an apple laced
and, like Artaud, he pieces it together from incomplete with cyanide. While Olesen’s work reflects these facts,
figures and changing perceptions. Similarly, the poem it does not present Turing as a mere victim of ideology.
by Kurt Schwitters—a sound deconstruction—is primal About Turing, he says:
vocal energy that disrupts the linguistic code. For
Olesen it is also playful and humorous, with sexual In 1936, he published a theoretical model of a
connotations. Olesen cannibalizes gay writers, Dada machine that was to constitute the basis of all
poets, Schwitters, and Artaud’s theater in order to stage post-war computing, making him the father of
his break with the Oedipal, heteronormative part of all modern computer science. And this part of
Western culture. As Jorge Fernández writes in a text his biography is a futuristic tale about thinking
on Artaud, “The point is not to put on masks, but to machines, artificial intelligence and the appearance
remove all of them: the masks of the ‘I,’ of culture, of of possible future bodies. And to me, this is a
power, and of words. Artaudian representation breaks long-needed escape from biological, heterosexual
with Platonic prefiguration.”15 reproduction.17
Allen Ginsberg described Artaud’s “Pour en finir avec The series of collages shows reworked images of Turing,
le jugement de Dieu”—which Olesen includes and modified with an apple, screws, cables, and texts or
appropriates in some of his catalogues—as “a total statements like “The body is a machine” and “Machines
declaration of independence from all solidified forms are slaves.” It also includes the mechanomorphic portrait
of consciousness.”16 Since Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, of Apollinaire made by Picabia after the poet’s death,
Olesen’s work has increasingly been characterized by portraying him as a machine along with the phrases:
this deglutition, by the denial of the Platonic double, and “Guillaume Apollinaire irritable poète, tu ne mourras
by the desire to break the barriers of consciousness and pas tout entière” (Guillaume Apollinaire, irritable poet,
oedipalizing processes, while exploring new networks you will never completely die) and “Maitre de soi-même”
of signification and other ways of representing. (Master of himself). In How Do I Make Myself a Body?,
Olesen copies the outline of the machine, and in a
The body without organs also featured strongly in kind of game of mirrors he inserts a line from a poem
another, almost contemporaneous project in which by Apollinaire next to Alan Turing’s name: “La vérité
Olesen asked How Do I Make Myself a Body? (2008). ressemble à la mort” (Truth is like death). Artaud is
In this case, he presented new, often witty proposals also present—“No Arm, No Legs, No Mouth, No Foot,
based on a portrait of the English mathematician Alan etc.”—and Olesen swallows more energies: there is a
Turing, considered the father of modern computing. remake of Man Ray’s 1920 The Enigma of Isidore
During World War II, Turing worked for the British Ducasse next to a contemporary version (a computer
government, deciphering codes such as those created wrapped in plastic). The larger project is rounded off
by the “unbreakable” Enigma machine. Despite his with a series of collages likewise called How Do I Make
importance as a scientist, in 1952 Turing was convicted Myself a Body?, which presents a selection of bodies:
of homosexual acts and forced to take synthetic female the masochist body, the body of the servant, the body
hormones. As a result of this experiment he lost his body, without organs, the body of the family, the hole-in-the-
became sexually impotent, and grew breasts. Turing ass body, the organized body, the disorganized body,
15 Jorge Fernández Gonzalo, “El devenir artaudiano. Lectura de 16 Allen Ginsberg, in response to a question from a student,
Deleuze sobre Artaud,” A Parte Rei. Revista de Filosofía 75 (May “Spontaneous Poetics - 96 (Artaud-2),” The Allen Ginsberg Project,
2011), http://serbal.pntic.mec.es/AParteRei/gonzalo75.pdf. July 3, 2013, https://allenginsberg.org/2013/07/spontaneous-
poetics-96-artaud-2/.
17 Olesen, “Future Bodies and Gendered Prophecy.”
Rote Ecke (Red Corner), 2018 >

< Lack of Information, 2001

Installation view: Lack of Information, Studiogalerie,
Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), 2001
Collage/invitation card for the exhibition

Lack of Information, Studiogalerie, Kunstverein
Braunschweig (Germany), 2001

30 HELENA TATAY
and so on. There is an element of humor in the list, but not identify with the Oedipal subject, the unified subject,
above all there is possibility. Utopian? Not necessarily. explores other ways of signifying and representing.
We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in relation to
the body, affecting means of reproduction and possible
body modifications, which are astounding. Just recently, AFTER DHALGREN
scientists announced that they had introduced human
stem cells into pig embryos.18 The body has been a After Dhalgren is the title of a series of four large-scale
battleground for political and ideological struggles, collages on black masonite boards, on the surface of
as exemplified by the case of Alan Turing. But Olesen which painted gestures mix with images incorporated
avoids the trap of portraying him as a victim. He as if they were isolated signs: a biker in leather, fire,
suggests that bodies can change and mutate, creating two scorpions, fog, a picture of George Harrison,
a complex image through collage, which is essentially industrial ruins, homoerotic photos, a moonscape,
a remix allowing him to piece together an interplay of and a triangle. The eye constantly returns to these
references on various levels: Turing, artificial intelligence, juxtaposed images from different temporal, spatial,
structural violence, machines, the body without organs, and cognitive scales without finding a connecting
the homosexual body, master, slave, Enigma, copy and thread, only perceptions that evoke a dystopia—a
original, etcetera. In other words, he creates syntactic dark, psychedelic, erotic imaginary. The collages are
chains that resonate from one collage to another. based on Samuel R. Delany’s cult science-fiction novel
Dhalgren, a touchstone of gay culture. The story is set
Devouring Turing allows Olesen, like Artaud and Deleuze, in Bellona, a city that has been severely damaged and
to develop a transversal thought that moves, driven by cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown
desire, beyond physical and linguistic limits. For Gilles catastrophe. The novel is punctuated by inexplicable
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the body without organs— events like the appearance and disappearance of two
borrowed from Artaud—is the unconscious as a whole, moons and the fact that time appears to expand and
in other words, the unconscious of individuals, societies, contract. Kidd, the protagonist, suffers from partial
and history. It is desire in its pure state. Traditionally, amnesia, and the cast of characters includes George
desire had been considered to spring from dispossession Harrison as a local hero. Dhalgren does not follow a
or lack (like a stomach that needs to be filled up again linear narrative and is instead, Delany said, a circular
after each digestion, an image perfectly in line with text with multiple entry points. Science fiction played an
consumer society). But Deleuze says that desire produces ideological role for Olesen and his generation. Characters
reality. In his critique of psychoanalysis—which reduces in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels change gender in the
everything to the Oedipal scenario, normalizes desire, course of the story, and Delany described characters
and excludes difference—he points out that it relies on with nonstandard identities and sexualities living in a
interpretation and focuses on words (with the phallus world without guilt. According to Olesen, “what made
as the principal signifier). Which is why he argues for it a bit crazy is the fact that he introduces real figures,
the “necessity to introduce semiotic chains that would like George Harrison. That is interesting. Fictitious real
valorize not only words but other regimes ... such as figures. Like when you read Deleuze and he introduces
gesture and sensation.”19 The work of Olesen, who does Kafka characters in real events. Everything becomes real
18 Juan Carlos Izpisua has been experimenting with creating 19 Verena Andermatt Conley, “Thirty-six Thousand Forms
human-animal hybrid organs at the Salk Institute, California, of Love: The Queering of Deleuze and Guattari,” in Deleuze and
since 2015. See James Gallagher, “Human-Pig ‘Chimera Embryos’ Queer Theory, ed. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Stor (Edinburgh:
Detailed,” BBC News, January 26, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/ Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 26.
news/health-38717930; “Health Care 50: Juan Carlos Izpisua
Belmonte; Closing the Organ Deficit,” Time, n.d., http://time.
com/collection/health-care-50/5425094/juan-carlos-izpisua-
belmonte/.
Interior, 2016. Installation view: The Euphoria of Turin, Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, 2016 >

1935 1922, 2003
Installation view: Anthologie de l’amour sublime (Anthology

of Sublime Love), 2004, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, 2010
A l’intérieur de la vue. 10 poèmes visibles

(In the Interior of the View: 10 Visible Poems), 2003
1935 1922, 2003
Preparation–scans, original titles, prints, 2003
Rest, 2003

33

34 HELENA TATAY
by talking about it. I am interested in those different this case, the Museo Reina Sofía, a center of symbolic
realities and fragmentation.”20 power, falling apart.
Olesen later made a series of thirty-six small-scale In St. George & The Dragon (2016), Olesen appropriated
collages under the same title, After Dhalgren, consisting and subverted Anthony Caro’s red sculpture Early
of black-and-white photographic prints on a black One Morning (1962), placing it in the center of the
background. The altered images of industrial ruins, room where it became a rampant dragon with George
broken glass, knives, wrecked cars, and queer characters, Harrison’s face. Images of cuts of meat glued to plastic
with psychedelic effects and bizarre juxtapositions, panels were displayed on the walls around him, evoking
portray a world of altered states of consciousness or violence and the body. In Hell, the black surfaces of
parallel realities in which violent events have occurred the four collages No Arm, No Foot, No Tongue, No
and a strong eroticism remains. Together, they have a Leg—bodies without organs, spaces of desire with
strange and fascinating effect. They include elements glued bits of plastic and traces of marks—present
from the novel, but there is no attempt to recreate it; a false silence full of dark noise. Meanwhile, the
they are simply a point of connection with its world: colorful, psychedelic collage Inferno displayed opposite
images that show madness, confusion, and eroticism showed a landscape full of debris. There were also
in order to produce meaning. The two series take us sexual references, holes and pipes releasing liquid,
through a semantic topography that is clearly gay, and satanic rams surrounded by fire, like scenes from a
in this sense they are a key series in Olesen’s oeuvre. In Kenneth Anger film, and other recurring images: the
After Dhalgren, he revisited the history and narratives cigar, the milk carton, the biker in leather, a bound
of queer art, but this time, instead of seeking to show figure, this time surrounded by fire, pieces of meat
aspects that had been hidden or denied, he wanted to like the ones in St. George & The Dragon, and more
broaden its margins, to create new images to join the debris, creating a desolate wasteland. In both of these
existing ones, increasing representations. works—the one based on the myth of Saint George and
the dragon (a metaphor for inner struggle), and the
Olesen’s next projects, St. George & The Dragon (2016) and one that refers to a walk through hell—corporeality is
Hell (2016), which follow in the wake of After Dhalgren, expressed through a dissolution of the borders between
suggest a crisis. Both incorporate the opening lines of interior and exterior, and existential confusion with
Dante’s Inferno, a cultural reference to midlife crisis: countless formal, discursive, and perceptual references.
“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself
with a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway The project that perhaps best illustrates how Olesen
had been lost.”21 The two installations are enigmatic, articulates the coexistence of diverse content in a single
addressing the subject in different ways. And there space is his recent exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon in
is another version of the crisis in the architectural Berlin (2018), where the layout evokes the architectural
installation, Rechte Ecken (Straight Corners, 2015), form of the panopticon. Playing with the shape of the
in which the moldings of the four corners of a room pavilion and with Foucault’s famous essay Discipline
are presented on the floor, as though they had fallen and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Olesen chose to
off. They look like somewhat shabby post-minimalist call the installation Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry!
sculptures, with visible traces of the grease and silicon So one of the discourses established has to do with the
used to make the molds. These broken pieces of plaster gaze, the way bodies are watched, and the contrast
and wood imply a crisis in Angle, and they also draw between the transparent and the opaque, overexposure
attention to the corners, which hold up the space; in and concealment, in relation to the homosexual body.
20 Olesen, conversation with the author, October 2018. 21 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto I, 1–3,
trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

At the entrance, Olesen placed a wall blocking the way
and the view into the space. On this wall, a blue Angle
was displayed along with some color stickers. Once inside
the room, visitors’ attention scattered in all directions.
There was no center. Some works were placed in front
of the windows, blocking the view: black-bottomed
boxes with their contents stuck to the outside rather
than placed inside. Milk cartons and boxes of medicines
and other ordinary consumer products were displayed
on pallets on the floor. Olesen had painted over the
boxes roughly, simultaneously exhibiting and concealing
them. Everything appeared to slip between meanings, to
Homosexual Rights Around the World, 2000
inhabit an interstitial space. A door frame, Exit / Portal Autorität / Schuh (Authority / Shoe), 2000
(2018), stood in the middle of the room: come out?

expose oneself? It was a recreation of Robert Morris’s
Untitled (Box for Standing) (1961). An enormous clear
plexiglas “M,” Referring to: The Master-Slave Dialectic!
(2018), merges into the window behind it: a master
who is difficult to see. Not far away, on the floor, the
cardboard box The Discipline and Punish Box! (2018),
with a sexy picture of punishment glued on top. This
image, which was already part of Olesen’s atlas, appeared
repeatedly throughout the exhibition, eroticizing the
discourse on the body, power, and discipline. There
were other nods in the same direction, such as stickers
of the words “Discipline and Punishment!” beside the
word “Butter!” On the wall, a row of minimalist boxes
covered with fluorescent plexiglas invited visitors to
look inside, but it was difficult to see their contents:
clippings, texts, and photographs that had been part
of Olesen’s earlier works.
Overall, the exhibition was a mix of images, texts,

quotes, and references, which had previously appeared
in Olesen’s work, that he used to express his personal
vision of the social space, sexuality, and the discursive
development of queerness. But these references are
not stable codes. As visitors walked through the space,
their bodily, visual, and linguistic perceptions briefly
rejected or embraced signs, gestures, objects, and ideas.
Olesen carefully constructs his installations, attending
not only to the spatial dialogues between his works but
also to perceptions—in this case between the hidden
and the overexposed, with their bodily and cultural
counterparts.

36 HELENA TATAY
Anthologie de l’amour sublime (Anthology of Sublime Love), 2003 (details)

37

38
LARS BANG LARSEN
We Do Not Dispose
of Reliable Criteria…
Not Yet
A Politics of Gesture in the Work of Henrik Olesen

WE DO NOT DISPOSE OF RELIABLE CRITERIA… NOT YET 39
From its place next to nothing, the artistic gesture lacunae in conventional schema of meaning that are
connects to the total condition. In the work of Henrik organized between body and language, meaning and
Olesen, it plays out as something misplaced and in itself accident, reproduction and excess, and so on, to the
displacing, a means or a medium of the transformation point where bodies-in-communication are shown to be
that it seeks, also for itself. It observes: “It used to be always partial, involved, deferred, contingent. Gesture
like this; it is no longer the case,” and: “This moment not only means “how should I put it…” but also “how
can be a scene where we can re-create ourselves.” do I put this body together again?”
Gestures are ingrained in ways with which the living Like the art of Olesen, gestures make for slippery
human body appears in a situation and responds to reading. Their disregard for causality gives them an
it. They make known the awareness that any body is affinity to theory, in the sense of Stuart Hall’s notion
continually open to public and private readings, as a that theory is an exploratory medium, “a detour en
situated producer of itself. With no greater concern for route to something else.”1 For the same reason they
the difference between simple and offhand, and more are also aesthetic through and through because they
complex and elaborate gestures, the Concise Oxford resist dependency and open up to other realms. Mixed
Dictionary defines the use of body movements as a and displaced, they come with an air of sovereignty.
“rhetorical device,” locating that latter somewhere between More species-like than individually human, they pass
motion study and text. “Device” is suggestive of how through bodies irreducibly.
gestures today are operationally captured in the digital
economy as new purposeful standard movements, each Such here-and-thereness makes binary clarity waver and
movement of our fingertip a filing of the data body. renders it transitional, working both ways. Before sex,
there was gesture: defying essence, averse to linearity
The perennial suspicion against “rhetorical devices” is and ontology, gesture is originarily queer because always
their artifice; that they may be merely a dressing up of already post-identitarian. Similarly, Olesen’s works give
meaning but at the same time decisive of a message’s representation the slip and spend themselves in the
appeal and efficiency. Thus rhetoric is noticed when it is shifting materiality of relations. Their elaborate thematic
deemed too much, making the substance of communication frameworks—such as the reformation of laws about
spill over until you don’t quite know where it begins and homosexuality around the turn of the millennium, the
ends. Similarly, even as gesture calls for literacy, it does biography of Alan Turing, scientific investigations into
not fit the ideology of reading as an act of private and homosexuality of animals—make them as historically
replicable decoding, and hence it is seen to fall outside connected and delicate as nervous systems, themselves
of public agency. Gesture has a double-edged relation to affected and articulated within various devices: gazes,
intentionality, too: on the one hand, if there is gesture, diagnoses, institutions, discourses, social imaginaries,
intention must be unclear or unstable: if you knew what power effects.
to say, and have the adequate words, why the redundancy?
Why use your hands (eyes, facial expressions…) to get I don’t think that a “gesture analysis” can go to a supposed
your message across? On the other hand, gesture can be heart of Olesen’s production. Gesture connects bodies
seen to be a harbinger of pure intention: an emphatic and events, it doesn’t go to the heart of things. There is
act ahead of language, eagerness ushering in will or already something counterintuitive to reading Olesen’s
affect too strong to be held down with words. Thus work through gesture, because we don’t find the physical
gestural rhetorical devices produce contradictions and presence of the performing body here. Instead it travels
1 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,”
in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary
Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King
(London: Macmillan, 1991), 42–69.

LARS BANG LARSEN
in the cuts between images, in brittle meetings of sign

and matter, in traces of traces, in meditations on agency
and desire. What is more, a gesture in Olesen’s recent
work would not be of the same kind that it was earlier
on. But if you follow its fleeting, liminal movements—
between full and empty, inside and outside, being and
nonbeing—and how they break up specific realities and
break against them, you get a composite sense of lived
experience. I am after the artistic gesture’s drawing of
imaginary maps that depart from what conditions it,
and how it calls forth elsewheres by dissolving existing
patterns into the plasma of the everyday.
FLAKINESS AND EFFECT
Olesen’s style is found at Minimalism’s ground zero

of meaning, only to un-work itself ephemerally from
there. Relieved of smoothness and asemantic sublimity,
it is a Minimalism that is blemished and decadent and
close to bottom lines of needs and functions. Reduced
to this, art leaves a double-edged sense of magic but no
mystery or enchantment. This can point to a dominant
power’s psychosocial magic that deprives people of their
reason, and the seemingly inexplicable functioning of the
capitalist-bureaucratic machines that reproduce reality
and hence are passed off as neutral and consensual.
Or, it is the magic that comes with the knowledge that
reality is always in the making and therefore must
explode a positivist vocabulary; that is, when things
protect themselves against explanation because they
Installation view: The Body
is a Machine. Machines are are about to change.2
Slaves, Malmö Konsthall,
Malmö, 2010
I Will Not Go to Work Today.

Olesen’s 2018 gallery exhibition 6 or 7 new works made
I Don’t Think I Will Go opposing concepts mirror each other like images waving
Tomorrow, 2010
Installation view: 6th Berlin at us from infinity.3 Between them, the works produced
Biennale for Contemporary
Art, Berlin, 2010
Information on Some Gay-

Lesbian Artists (or Artists
Relevant to Homo-Social 2 I am paraphrasing Alfred Gell’s and Heinz von Foerster’s
Culture) in the Format of definitions of magic in Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An
the Daily Mail, October 17, Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); and Heinz
2004, 2006 (detail)
von Foerster, “Ethics and Second Order Cybernetics,” Cybernetics
and Human Knowing 1, no. 1 (1992): 9–20, available online at
https://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/hvf/137.1.
3 I am paraphrasing Ariane Müller from her press text for

Olesen’s exhibition 6 or 7 new works, Galerie Chantal Crousel,
Paris, April 28 – May 27, 2018. See pp. 92–93 in this volume.

disappearances and escapes, freeing something that An artistic non-medium, boxes have a different
had been shuddering publicly like in a scaffold. The materialization than the object and a different
small boxes and containers in the show had had low- conceptualization than the text. A comparison that crosses
commercial functions before being appropriated and historic context, but that is defensible due to strategies
worked over by the artist with only partial covering, that echo in each other by dint of being at the same
and not too thoroughly applied primary monotones. time formal and anything but, both queer and beyond
Placed on tables in constellations that look like three- queer, Olesen’s glass boxes call to mind Hélio Oiticica’s
dimensional renditions of statistical graphs, the milk maquettes for environments. PENETRÁVEL PN 16 NADA
cartons, medicine cases, and cereal boxes were containers (1971), for instance, would, if built, offer beholders the
that held—maybe still contained?—stuff to be ingested. chance to travel down narrow passageways separated
The exhibition brought forth echoes of shows by Group by curtains, enter spaces with projection devices that
Material, who favored curatorial strategies of mixing would throw their shadows onto black walls, until finally
consumer items and cultural artifacts, But such an arriving in a room with microphones suspended from
association betrays how these Hand-painted Surfaces in the ceiling. Here the beholder was envisioned to choose
Olesen’s treatment only in a limited way are informed an available mike “to talk about the word NADA. (In
by the semiotics of cultural theory. As Adrien Malcor English: nothing—in French: rien—in Spanish: nada)—
put it in a review of the show, the works are traces the given dictionary word, in its first impact.”5 People’s
that “tell of the presence-absence of a living everyday improvisations about nothingness will be “an exercise
body”—of a certain ghostliness of the body, then, an in non-spectacle, non-ritual, nonsignifying structure.”
ethos that also includes social collectives of unknown Proposed for, but never built, at the Praça da República
and anonymous bodies and their interactions, as they in São Paulo, PN 16 gives nothing back to social space.
are subcutaneously connected and choreographed by Also Olesen’s series As Yet Untitled and Hand-painted
stuff we consume and its opaque, mutational agency.4 Surfaces are so many subtractive protocols according
to which the world can be reinvented at the site of
No less haunted were a series of glass cubes and cases, imperceptible difference. But where Oiticica proposes
As Yet Untitled 1–9, fitted more or less neatly by hand. to evoke absence at the site of paralyzed nationhood
Perched on heavy white or chrome angle brackets, they during dictatorship, Olesen responds to a biopolitical
inhabited the walls of the space where Surfaces were regime that—like some perverse governmental twist
shown. Empty apart from the odd till receipt, a Post- on Antonin Artaud’s body in pieces—operates through
it with the word “ARM,” or a piece of masking tape a recombinant logic of consumer choice at the level of
with the number 8, they displayed nothing but the subjectivity. His works’ response to such normative
air inside, the wall behind, and the fixtures that kept technologies of the self is to gesture with bodies that are
them suspended. In their inversion of causality and only metonymically present as packages of nutritional
visibility—of container and contained, seen object and and pharmaceutical data that influence our future being.
transparent material—they call to mind Maurice Blanchot’s
paradoxical definition of Marxism as “answers without Brian O’Doherty talks of the artistic gesture as enabled
questions”: the giving of a name to what previously by a “hitch in time”: something only halfway sayable
had none, a raising of questions where there was no that turns around an unresolved tension between
way of asking. the present time and the historical forms available to
4 “Ces traces … disent la présence-absence d’un corps vivant, 5 Guy Brett, “The Experimental Exercise of Liberty,” in Hélio
quotidien.” Adrien Malcor, “Á qui veut… ‘Mettez un tigre dans votre Oiticica, ed. Guy Brett et al., exh. cat. Witte de With, Rotterdam
corps-machine.’ Deux ou trois réflexions sur l’exposition parisienne et al. (Rotterdam et al., 1992), 222–39.
d’Henrik Olesen (6 or 7 new works, galerie Chantal Crousel),”
August 2, 2018, at L’Arachnéen, http://www.editions-arachneen.
fr/?page_id=66.
Pages 42–43: Installation view: I Will Not Go to Work Today. I Don’t Think I Will Go Tomorrow (Machine Assemblage I),
2010, 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2010



44 LARS BANG LARSEN
it.6 O’Doherty’s theorization has a spatial emphasis, than many traditional modes of evidencing life
though, in an exceptional dramatization of art’s media and politics.… We must also understand that after
and institutional setting—Duchamp’s coal bags in the gesture expires, its materiality has transformed
ceiling, for instance—something that gives the artistic into ephemera that are utterly necessary.9
gesture a meta-life around and about art. From here we
can jump to José Esteban Muñoz, according to whom Gesture flips and flops, full and erotic one moment, a
the homosexually coded gesture has a distinctly temporal necessary trace the next. My present body will fly into
existence. It is a “storehouse of queer history and futurity,” pieces, yes, and a new one will be assembled—but you will
crisscrossed by material contradictions: it is a kind of forget me all the same… as you could paraphrase Artaud.10
archive, even when it is the live art of queer dance; Inhabited by so much uninscribed homo history, gesture’s
a storehouse, whose contents—from molly houses to presence is fleeting at best; a paradoxical historicity
the late twentieth-century AIDS crisis—only recently that is repressed with stereotypically hyperidentifying
have become subjects for recovery and recollection.7 gazes. Olesen’s archival project, the book Some Faggy
Queer gesture’s historic trajectory is thus indicative Gestures from 2008, is a reparative rewriting in text
of other issues than the general waning of gesturality and images of Western art history from a homosocial
that theorists see as a feature of capitalist modernity. point of view, providing cultural memory of what has
According to Richard Sennett’s analysis, the effects of been undone and erased in plain view.11 While the
industrialism’s comprehensive revision of embodied scholarly tone of his accompanying essay is genuine
subjectivity ousted gesturality from the vocabulary of enough (it is a research-based piece of writing), it belies
comportment and good manners as it used to be expressed how the text manipulates contemporary art history
in traditional (aristocratic, bourgeois, religious) ideals of by blurring heterosexist enunciations within a queer
self-presentation. Not so with gesture’s queer collective frame of reference. By thus doing several things at the
“storehouse,” in which dwells entire shadow-histories same time, the text performs a historic predicament
and expressive surpluses.8 through its own parallel lives: here the queer gesture
is understood as an attribute appropriated, and honed
Even by the standards of gesture, its queer version is as code, by women and men deprived of their qualities.
hard to catch—and it is meant to be that way, because Attuned to sensibility, it asks to be picked up by those
according to Muñoz it allows you to escape “the evidentiary who are capable of reading (in) the gap between desire
logic of heterosexuality”: and acceptable social form. Meditations such as this
give art its power of disidentification—and it ultimately
[The gesture] is supposed to slip through the speaks against Muñoz’s differentiation between what
fingers and comprehension of those who would use is hetero and what is queer, a surprisingly firm and
knowledge against us.… For queers, the gesture and disambiguating framing of gesture that in fact renders
its aftermath, the ephemeral trace, matter more it somewhat evidentiary.
6 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the 8 Sven Lütticken discusses “the modern crisis of gesturality”
Gallery Space (London: Lapis Press, 1986 [1976]), 105–6. The in terms of an oscillation between gesture-as-symptom and ges-
artistic gesture has been connected to desire’s presence in painting ture-as-symbol. See his informative essay “Gestural Study,” Grey
and meta-artistic intervention on the scale of architecture. The Room, no. 74 (Winter 2019): 86–111.
quintessential painterly gesture would of course be Jackson Pollock’s
action painting; O’Doherty applied the notion to a meta-artistic 9 Ibid.
utterance that takes the white cube as its material, a post-Dadaist
one-upmanship of the gallery space, whereby the artist departs 10 Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from
from institutional expectations of the art object. Hierarchies the Final Period, trans. Clayton Eshleman (Boston: Exact Change,
are shifted, and the entire art institution becomes the artist’s 1995), 323.
plaything, an artistic methodology that has become unsurprising and
spectacularized in the culture industry since O’Doherty’s analysis. 11 Heike Munder and Henrik Olesen, eds., Some Faggy Gestures,
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2008).
7 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of
Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 81.

Muñoz’s delightful notion of “utterly necessary ephemerality” of the spectacle of art and life... But, as Georges Didi-
can be enlisted to describe désœuvrement. How, as form Huberman asks à propos of the clinic, “Can there be a
is compromised, materiality begins to move in time and spectacle without staging?”14 In ephemeral movements,
space, for instance in the fact that—as Olesen puts it—“the the cultural program that erected the exhibitionary
gesture is a scratch that it has taken five months to think complex is being worked over by Olesen: framing the
up.”12 In such transvaluations his works eschew consistency staging, figuring the rhetoric of power.
and composition as guarantors for meaning and value.
Ephemerality directs attention toward the curtailing of
gesture, whether artistic or not, that occurs when it is seen THE AIRY POSSIBILITIES OF THE SOUL
to be uniquely authored (as in O’Doherty’s understanding
of artistic gesture), or reduced to a commodity structure Because gesture was deemed a threat to the distinction
(as in the digital economy). Thus artistic gesture must between form and content, essence and accident, philosophy
perform its future expiration: it must be exorbitant, at dismissed it. Arguing against the sensualism of Art
the same time been and gone, deliberately venturing Nouveau in favor of more abstract procedures, György
out and allowing itself to be affected by its impending Lukács writes, in an essay about Søren Kierkegaard
disappearance and subsequent tracing. Un-crafted in from 1909, that the gesture is a self-deceiving way to the
poor materials and underwhelming forms, Olesen’s absolute in life because it is in the vitality of the gesture
art is “flaky,” to use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s that spirit and matter, reality and possibility, form and
derogative characterization of works created under the life, the finite and the unlimited, are imagined to cross
influence of drugs; the two philosophers see such works one another.15 Thus gesture is seen as a Lebenskunst
to be “unable to preserve themselves, and break up as that wishes to “forge the airy possibilities of the soul
soon as they are made or looked at.”13 Maybe some of into realities,” Lukács admonishes. Hereby it interferes
Olesen’s are made under the influence, but that is not with criteria for what is up and down in the world,
the point. With their (in this case) rather normalizing mixing up in constitutional matters. Around the same
gaze on art, Deleuze and Guattari didn’t realize how time, Henri Bergson distinguished gesture from the
dialectical flakiness actually makes the work. meaningful act by diminishing it to an automatism:
he read it, psychologistically, as “the movements and
Gesture’s expiration in inconclusive materiality brings even the language by which a mental state expresses
out contextual determinants. The permanence of the itself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no
built environment that hosts the flaky work is tempted to other cause than a kind of inner itching.”16 It causes
overstate itself, and connections are forged to perceptual excitation with its explosive lack, preventing that we
systems and symbolic orders other than—or that are take something seriously. (Gesture is shallow: it doesn’t
folded into—the art system. Authoritative gazes are have the depth of the emotional discharge, the liberation
mute, without gesture, feigning to be pure, endowed of affect. If it really is a symptom, as per Bergson, or a
with a capacity to understand and control the language “cerebral automatism” as the “Napoleon of neurology”
12 Henrik Olesen, in telephone conversation with the author, 15 György Lukács, “Livets sønderknusning af formen. Søren
December 8, 2018 (translated from the Danish). Kierkegaard og Regine Olsen” (1909), in Sjælen og formerne
(Copenhagen: Bibliotek Rhodos, 1979), 34. My translation from the
13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991), Danish: “smede sjælens luftige muligheder til virkeligheder.” It was
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia also published in English as “The Foundering of Form Against Life:
University Press, 1994), 165. Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen” (1909), in Soul and Form, trans.
Anna Bostock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 44. In
14 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the original German, Lukács writes about the Lebenskunst, “die
the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (1982), trans. Alisa luftigen Möglichkeiten der Seele zu Wirklichkeiten schmieden will.”
Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 23.
16 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the
Comic (1900), trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell
(New York: Macmillan, 1911; Project Gutenberg, 2008), 43.

46 LARS BANG LARSEN
Jean-Martin Charcot had it earlier on, its fleetingness and social enclosures. The 2018 exhibition Hey Panopticon!
ought to be scientifically mappable—but what it is a Hey Asymmetry!, at Berlin’s art center the Schinkel
symptom of?17 Even if we don’t get a straight answer Pavillon, took as its point of departure the architecture
to this question, pathology remains close enough to of the gallery, created in the 1950s as a near 360-degree
taint gesture and indicate an ontology. Just witness viewpoint onto the new city that was rising out of the
the historical fate of the limp-wristed faggots.) rubble of the war. Olesen contextualized the Pavillon
with Foucault’s seminal theorization of the panopticon
Gratuitous, irritating, naïve, its own limit. Even if they in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).
assume that there is nothing behind gesture other than A social metaphor beyond built space, the panopticon is
self-deception and contingency, Lukács and Bergson an edifice that produces an interdependent relationship
instructively situate it in the middle of things and at between an invisible observer and the greatest possible
the crossroads of discourse.18 Too busy to be simply number of observed parties. Thus, as the artist Ariane
disruptive, the gesture is not only a breaker but also Müller writes for Olesen’s exhibition,
a broker of meaning. Herein lies its true messiness: it
produces signifying effects. Gesture rewires cognition, … the observed are well aware of an observing
expression, memory, and perception, producing effects presence generating an omnipresent non-point
that make things happen in un-authored ways that threat of knowing everything about everyone.
leave much to the imagination because they disappear In an attempt to evade closer introspection, the
origins and push the actual present into the virtual. As observed therefore project images of themselves
pure means that manifest forces external to control, for the observer they presume to be somewhere
the autopoietic disobedience of effects is ludic and out there.19
childlike: now sensation no longer belongs to human
subjects, but somehow to the effects themselves and The panopticon, in other words, is a subjectively embodied
the stimuli they produce. By exceeding and preceding feeling for the law that is hard to pin down, and impossible
the distinction between subject and object, the effect to shake off, because it is performed in a real yet inconstant
is something as strange and self-contradictory as an dialectic. It is the dim awareness of a control function
autonomous supplement. A secondary mover, it takes that splits a group or collective into individual subjects by
on a life of its own that subsists equally across circuits submitting them to an in-principle ubiquitous gaze, and
and systems, animal bodies and discursive registers. soliciting from them representations of themselves that
Olesen’s works profit from this other side of ephemerality can no longer be assessed by themselves. Thus panoptic
by circumnavigating highbrow and slapstick, counterpublic asymmetry has strange and paradoxical effects, such as
and mainstream, power critique and any esprit sérieux. how it will both disappear you and overexpose you. The
Their flaky and elastic address to determining cultural exhibition worked through such intuitions of diffuse,
entities are like so many effects that have momentarily distributed power by addressing the panopticon as a
congealed in evasive maneuvers away from root definitions mode for the controlling gaze to hide its indiscretion
17 Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 293. 19 Ariane Müller, statement for Henrik Olesen: Hey Panopticon!
Hey Asymmetry!, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, September 8, 2018 –
18 When you consider that Danish-born Olesen has by now lived December 20, 2018. See pp. 76–77 in this volume.
half his life south of the border, it maybe makes sense to speculate
that there in a clear and specific sense is something German about
the gesture’s unsettling of binarity: according to clichés, on the
one hand German Kultur is Prussian discipline, critical reason’s icy
drive for truth, the lawfulness of language; and on the other it is
the excess of opera, the wastefulness of expressionism, and the
extravagant and obscene nonsense of cabaret, Dada, and punk.
However, the compartmentalization of culture is rendered porous
more often than one would think, with zoned-off contents spilling
over and mixing into one another to be picked up by aesthetics.

47
Untitled, 2019

48 LARS BANG LARSEN
at the same time as it administers its disciplining “eye- As self-consumption was made hyperreferential, it exploded
blows”—coup d’œil, as they say in French. To paraphrase the self-identity that its commercial versions promise
Lukács, power hereby found a way to forge the airy to enforce and expand.20 Using his own production
possibilities of the soul into the reality of control. as a shifting boundary between being the subject for
presentation-as-itself and an object for recoding-as-
Both fish and fowl, neither here nor there, gesture is something-else, Olesen thus quoted and cannibalized
imbued with the power to clear space or fill up an his earlier works, such as his counterfeit parents Mr.
imagined reality. Olesen’s other 2018 series of boxes, Knife and Mrs. Fork (2009), and let the exhibition buzz
from the Schinkel Pavillon show, is worked over with with gestures of affiliation including John Ashbery,
lacquer, paint, and text printouts, and supplied with Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, and Louis Althusser. One work
silkscreen prints directly on the wood they are made is titled Naked Lunch Box: what William Burroughs
of. With outbreaks of images in his trademark agit used to bring his packed lunch in, silly, which was to
povera style, they hang side by side, gaping like empty, be placed bit after bit on the tip of his fork for him to
lumpen versions of Paul Thek’s angstful repurposing stare intensely at it. If queer history weren’t one you
of a Warhol Brillo Box, or as if they have consumed could pick yourself, then what would be the point of it?
VALIE EXPORT’s performance-by-proxy of intrusive
male hetero desire in her 1968 Tapp- und Tast-Kino (a Another box, No Mouth No Tongue Box, hedges its keep-
title you might translate as “Gropey-Feely Cinema”). it-realness on radical disembodiment: “No Anus … No
Availing themselves of fluorescent colors usually Legs No Arm No Feet No Eyes No Belly.” This work
associated with the lower range of consumer appeal, makes no bones about opening up to transformation
the boxes combine destabilizing imagery in black and beyond the subject-form, to un-congealing movements
white, such as apocalyptic close-ups of mountains of that make you some-un-body. To someone of Olesen’s
rubbish; in fact, remains from the production of work. generation, this is a different horizon of unbecoming than
the one that faced homos in the 1980s when “we went
Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry! played the cultural to funerals all the time,” as a friend put it.21 After the era
gaze against itself. Twisting panoptic logic toward a of governmental stigmatization of HIV/AIDS, Olesen’s
self-survey of sorts, the exhibition contrasted stakes is a call for the remaking of sexuality, for a renewal of
of coming out against the very contemporary cultural social relations outside of social policing; an evaluation
expectation that subjects consume themselves publicly: outside of the tacky ideologies of confession, guilt, and
confess in public, self-represent and experience in public, retribution.22 His politics of the imperceptible is one
etcetera. There were portals galore, to confront or escape based on a radical questioning or dis-identification
overexposure and over(self-)production, such as scaffold- of any process of (self-)representation; a casting in
like structures—why should the scaffold go out of style doubt of fixed identity and already-given discursive
as a means of public correction if you can put capitalism recuperations.
itself in it?—and a large wooden frame through which
you could magically pass and disappear into nothing, Thus in Olesen there is ultimately little comfort in
as well as possibilities for seeing and blindness in the the counter-discourses. You will look in vain for any
(un)form of boxes placed in front of the windows facing certainties to swear by. His undoing of identifications
the surrounding cityscape. and superstructures makes historic conflict stick to his
20 For discussions of the concept of self-consumption, please 22 See also the chapter “Everyday Excess and Continuous
see my Kunst er norm (Aarhus: Det Jyske Kunstakademi, 2009), Experience,” in Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and
and Arte y norma (Buenos Aires: Cruce Casa Editora, 2016). Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the
Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008), for their
21 I am grateful to Stig Sjölund for this remark. discussion of “the regime of life control” in relation to the HIV/AIDS
pandemic of the West in the 1980s.

work like flypaper. There is power in every nook and means for queers to distance themselves from “your
cranny, and so power critique too—on the milk carton, the world,” the majority culture of prohibitive social norm.
Frosties box, behind the radiator... No vacuums or oases The plasticity of gesture meets a digital realm that is
here. It is a play of everyday excess: a multiplication of indifferent to symbolic communication. As solipsistic
checkpoints on the social cells where control is found, yes, as Paul B. Preciado’s pharmacopornographic subject
but also of positions where it is confronted, and of sites may seem, there is a residue of higher ape behavior in
from where escape already took place as a constitutive its unequivocal centering on genital sex: at least he
act: there is control, discipline, and punishment because masturbates. If we compare with the purely instinctual
there in the first place is movement, escape, fugitive “click drive” as evoked by Mark Fisher, we are closer still to
desire. Farewell to Foucault, then. reptile functionality. Immersed in the continuous partial
attention of cyberspace-time, we find ourselves, Fisher
writes, “in a state of digital jitter,” always prepared to
SOME SORT OF MEDIATOR make the next click. A spasmodic symptom of the digital
OR SMUGGLER era’s libidinally dispersed Taylorism, the click drive makes
pornography seem quaint: “For pornography demands
Even for the vitalist, it was too much. Bergson’s view of at least a minimum of lingering over its images; whereas
gesture as an itch you can’t scratch indicates its neural with the click drive, the desire is always and only to
makeup, its plastic capacity for transformation. His click.”24 Preciado’s and Fisher’s respective diagnoses seem
disqualification of it echoes in Catherine Malabou’s much to be dystopian fulfillments of Deleuze and Guattari’s
later understanding of plasticity as synapses taking form view of cyberspace as a haptic (rather than optic) space
according to experience. That is, gesture may also be to be navigated step by step, a space of pure connection
understood as an effect of neural embossment through that pulls the nervous system in different directions and
cultural induction or trauma. Reminiscent of Lukács’s animates it to different rhythms. You can paint this as
disparagement about gesture’s conceptual hypermobility, black as you want: from the pharmacopornographic
Malabou notes that plasticity is able to situate itself imperative of “fuck you yourself,” to neo-Pavlovian forms
“perfectly” in-between metaphysics and its other, playing of online existence.25
the part of “some sort of mediator or smuggler”; as a
“structure of transformation and destruction of presence Gesture’s fleetingness makes it all too human—but this,
and the present.”23 A conductor for the antagonisms of too, is ambiguous. It is intra- and inter-human, both
the day, tuned in to the givens and the speed of things, culturally ingrained in human subjects and existing in-
the gesture performs the way the individual subject is between them (as Vilém Flusser notes, also the “masses
plastically charged with the general mood of culture. of bodies called revolutions” can be termed gestures26).
Frantz Fanon’s description of the permanently tensed Thus we can add it to the supposedly arch-human concepts
muscles of the colonial subject comes to mind; and of the litmus test of the elementary difference between
to Jean Genet, gestures are drastic and imaginative the human being and the intelligent machine: Can a
because they can pull together the innocent and the machine desire? Can it strike? And can it gesture? Such
fateful, inner necessity and the unaccountable, as a questions are perhaps asked in the hope that a clear
23 Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, 25 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in
Destruction, Deconstruction (2004), trans. Carolyn Shread (New the Pharmacopornographic Era (2008), trans. Bruce Benderson
York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 8–9 (italics in the original). (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), 265.
24 Mark Fisher, “Digital Psychedelia: The Otolith Group’s 26 Vilém Flusser, Gestures (1991), trans. Nancy Ann Roth
Anathema,” in Death and Life of Fiction: Modern Monsters; Taipei (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 2. The present
Biennial 2012 Journal, ed. Anselm Franke and Brian Kuan Wood essay takes inspiration for a part of its title from a line in this book:
(Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Leipzig: Spector Books, 2014), “we have no criteria for the validity of our readings” (3).
162–66.

Untitled #03, 2011

answer would give “us” humans license to quench with “aggressive incongruity,” to use Georges Bataille’s phrase,
impunity a potential rebellion from our machine slaves. generative of a malaise “obscurely linked to a profound
When Olesen disassembled his old PowerBook, “it was seduction.”28 Flakiness now reverberates through a gothic
like taking myself apart,” he told me, as we looked at the iconography that commands our gazes with effects of rage
cybernetic butterfly board of disaggregated computer and cruelty that connect the oneiric and the dreamless.
bits. Which implies that his computer before that had In a subsequent series of large collages, Hell (2016),
in some sense assembled him. Reclaiming recombinant the gap in reality that is hereby laid bare is displaced
subjectivity by means of a tooled-up gesture: the artist to indict a logic that literally works against nature. Hell
used a screwdriver to undo himself. When performed echoes Dhalgren in remainders or absences of images
by a cyborg, gesture is by no means less ambiguous from the latter: what is left is an endgame with scattered
and diverse, as it now positions the human body on occult signs, scratches, inarticulated strokes of paint,
the scale of the posthuman. The Bergsonian binary of and transparent plastic that produces minimal effects by
the body as a meeting between inside and outside is disappearing black images into a black background. In a
perforated by a transmutation of the nervous system toxic-psychedelically colorful frieze, images of pollution,
that is digitally reassembled and extended in electronic rubbish, and sides of animal meat dance in the dismal
circuitry, or disembodied in clouds. incongruence of ecosystemic dissolution.
As much as any works by Olesen, Dhalgren and Hell

EPHEMERA OF THE NOW are vested in an aesthetic of the fact that is well aware
that the production of truth is always a theatrical
In his essay on political violence, Walter Benjamin ruse. This runs deeper than, say, Kenneth Anger’s
provided an outline for a disconnect of the means- stylish perfection of the leatherman image in Scorpio
and-ends dialectic in society’s political and legal Rising, his 1963 art film for guys with a preference
institutions. If repression, exclusion, and violence—real for leather jackets and big packets; or his obscenely
or symbolic—are acceptable functions of normative readable Hollywood Babylon (1959), a subversion of
systems of representation, then the actual signification the gossip column full of dead, drugged, and abusive
of the system is to be found elsewhere than in itself and movie stars. The allegorizing drive of the gothic style,
its claim to justice. Thus a politics of pure means would its frequently comic and hysteric theatricalization of
mean the possibility of justice untainted by interests of emotional extremes, is so many rhetorical kicks and
preserving or mandating certain forms of life. In this exacerbating maneuvers born of real helplessness and
context, the ethics of gesture is found in “the process of silencing before unrelenting laws. Every law that is
making a means visible as such,” as Giorgio Agamben the source of dominant reality effects must be met by
sums up Benjamin’s proposition.27 a drama that shakes the world and whips up a storm.
In Dhalgren, and the series of smaller collages After
The other side of the normative system where pure means Dhalgren (2016), which supplies thirty-six A4-sized
reign can be called evil. The series of large, painterly dual black-and-white images of dark masculinity and
collages Dhalgren (2015) explores signs and images for things broken, sharp, and desolate, gesture’s expiration
such symbolic collapse. Inkjet-printed photos—positive haunts the images as a time wobble, a gratuitous excess.
and negative—of knives, ruins, leathermen, scorpions, “Today and yesterday collide with tomorrow,” declares
explosions, fire, and smoke appear on a black background the cover blurb of Samuel Delany’s scabrous, Babylonian
among rudimentary geometries; a picture essay of post-sci-fi novel Dhalgren (1975). “It is not that I have
27 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Infancy and History: 28 Georges Bataille, “The Deviations of Nature” (1930), in Visions
The Destruction of Experience (1978), trans. Liz Heron (London: of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl et al.
Verso, 1993), 133–40. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 55.

52 LARS BANG LARSEN
no past,” his protagonist Kidd explains at the beginning Employing the uncanny to kinky effect, a 2015 gallery
of the book, “Rather, it continually fragments on the show staged a tryst, insouciantly mediated by Olesen,
terrible and vivid ephemera of the now.”29 Time is between Anthony Caro and Francis Bacon in New York’s
unmoored, and in a mad, collapsed world beneath a Chinatown. A large red untitled sculpture is a plywood
deadly sun, people drift outside of the social fabric as and found scrap metal version of Caro’s Early One
much as does desire; the sex is chaotic and plentiful. Morning (1962), replete with a George Harrison poster.
Moving about on kinesthetic memory in the broken The simulacrum could be a chariot without wheels, a
city, “To try consciously for destination was to come man-o’-war, or a dragon; some wild Mischwesen or some
upon street signs illegible through smoke, darkness, or image of power. Caro’s impure Minimalism as a gate
vandalism, wrongly placed, or missing.”30 In Olesen’s to Hell. Its ominous redness received a visceral reply
Dhalgren collages, the former Beatle George Harrison from photographic prints, taped onto large sheets of
figures prominently, sexually reinvested, and now with plastic, of quartered animal sides; reworkings of images
his name reconnected to his image. That is, in Delany found on the Internet. Repetitions of the motif gave the
it is the big, bad, black guy—who always appears in his hanging the aspect of a film from an abattoir. Calling
texts, also in Dhalgren—who is incongruently called to mind Bacon’s “hysteria of painting,” it is interesting
so. Olesen’s (sincere?) attempt at putting history back to note that where Malabou underscores plasticity’s
into whack with George Harrison as the signifier with “deflagration of presence,” Deleuze conversely exalts in
which Delany flippantly undid it produces terribly Bacon an “excessive presence” of instinct and sensation.32
ambiguous effects. Deleuze declares not to have the represented violence
in mind—not the screams and deformed bodies or
Muñoz’s “necessary ephemera” and Delany’s “ephemera monsters that Bacon depicted—but instead the “violence
of the now” reorganize time itself from a ground of of sensation” itself, that is, Bacon’s use of color “as a
civilizational fear. Those seen to provoke this fear—ethnic, system of direct action on the nervous system”; a phrase
racial, and sexual others alike—have been construed whose reference to systematic procedures displaces the
as temporal aberrations, backwards and regressive in painterly gesture. Olesen’s meat sides are in their own
terms of individual development as well as in human way as prodigious as a Bacon, and maybe they also
history. The scientific or political theories that in this give us “eyes all over,” as Deleuze sees it happening in
way have assigned homosexuality to the place of the Bacon (eyes “in the ear, stomach, lungs...”). Whereas
past, span individual and cultural time lines whose Deleuze is quite convinced of having the experience,
own straightness is never in doubt.31 This casts into Olesen shatters it with more-than-painterly obscenity.
relief how Muñoz designates a special temporality to As John Kelsey describes this shattering, “Everything
queerness that he calls utopian in that it lies beyond here seems to seek displacement, changing senses and
lived experience by any one individual: by striving to direction, abstraction becoming figurative, bodies
think and feel a then and there we can go outside of becoming signs, as an artistic practice attempts to open
the present in a not-yet-being, an anticipatory and itself toward further, unscripted options.”33 Instead of
structuring mode of desiring that is always on the Bacon’s painterly poise, there is dead prosaic deferral
agenda but that we never arrive to. in Olesen: the machine violence of the bone saw, the
29 Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 11. 32 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
(1981), trans. Daniel W. Smith (London and New York: Continuum,
30 Ibid., 543. 2005), 37.
31 I am borrowing from Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: 33 John Kelsey, text for Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings
Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: State University of New York Fine Art, January 24 – February 28, 2016. See pp. 128–129
Press, 2009), x. in this volume.
Milk, 2019 >

split carcasses. Gestures hover around bodies and they and linearity, a loss that wins the future. Trembling or
can go to the bone too, till you begin to doubt if you with a shrug, control and certainty can be undone when
see with your own eyes at all. life turns out to be precarious and unpredictable. This
condition holds new possibilities: once the desire for
The opening lines of Dante’s Inferno are stuck to the overview or master narrative is renounced, confusion
floor in front of the Caro simulacrum: Midway upon the can become something generative, an orientation toward
journey of our life / I found myself with a forest dark, / something different to come that refuses to be reduced
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. The loss to positive knowledge. Getting lost is an adventure
of the “straightforward pathway” is also a loss of progress when it happens on the way to non-arrival.
Pages 56–57: The Master-Slave Dialectic, 2012. Installation view: Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, 2012

PAUL B. PRECIADO
A Visit to
H.E.N.R.I.K. O.L.E.S.E.N.’s
Hall of Fantasy

A VISIT TO H.E.N.R.I.K. O.L.E.S.E.N.’S HALL OF FANTASY 59
It has happened to me, on various occasions, but not the actual, may here meet and talk over the flaws of
on so many, to find myself in a certain edifice or room history and the business of their dreams.”
which would appear to have some of the characteristics
of an exhibition. Its interior is often a spacious hall, And so it was, entering that place that received me
with white walls, and gray or white pavement. The under the letters H.E.N.R.I.K. O.L.E.S.E.N., a place
walls and windows of this hall have a breadth and that seemed and did not at the same time look like an
grandeur of design and a coldness that have nowhere exhibition, I had the vision of a perverse humanity, or
been equaled, except in the factories of the Old World perhaps it has to be said of a machinic animality, where
or in the pavilions of modern hospitals. But most often the civilizing work has been interrupted and deviated,
these windows, no matter how fantastic, have been where Adam builds a society directly with Abel and
sealed, covered, or blinded. Unlike their prototypes, Cain (not his children, but companions on a drift), and
they have denied the light of heaven, to bring vision Eve, who was assigned male sex at birth, accompanied
only via electrical means, thus filling the hall with a dull by Mary, Joseph’s feminine pseudonym, has extracted
and equal radiance, so that its inmates, like chickens from hirs body an organ also indeterminate (some said
in cages or pigs fed to be killed, breathe, as it were, a uterus, other said they had seen a testicle) to make
visionary atmosphere, a tread upon the fantasies of with it the pigment base of a chromatism only used
poetic minds. These peculiarities, combining a wilder before by psychiatrists and jurists. Art and nature must
mixture of styles and images than even a contemporary fight each other. As much as art and science must be
critic usually recognizes as allowable, cause the whole opposed. Fantasy, stronger than art and science together,
edifice to give the impression of a dirty mess, which must here be conceived as a missile that is launched
might be dissipated and shattered to fragments by merely to divert the trajectory of another missile already en
stamping the foot upon the pavement. Yet, with such route that goes directly to the vulnerable place where
modifications and repairs as successive ages demand, the desire for change arises. For a desiring mind and a
this smilingly looking exhibition space is likely to endure somatic apparatus not corrupted by vice, not marked by
longer than the most substantial cathedral halls that vigilance, punishment, and exclusion, these compositions
ever cumbered the earth. of words and images are unintelligible. Properly absurd
and insignificant, for all human institutions, including
It is not at all times that one can gain admittance into the exhibition, only make sense if one takes into account
this edifice, although most persons enter it at some the perverted and corrupt character of the humans
period or other of their lives; if not in their waking who built them.
moments, then by the universal passport of a dream.
At my last visit, I wandered thither unawares while “What kind of assemblage is this? May it be still called
my mind was busy with an idle tale, and was startled an exhibition?” observed I.
by the throng of emails, tweets, and notifications that
didn’t stop to rise up around me. “Maybe yes, maybe not,” the talking shadow replied.
“Maybe the very name exhibition is tied to the aberrations
“Bless me! Where am I?” cried I, with but a dim of the law and science that invented our misery. Yet we
recognition of the place. see but a small portion of the space. What is hidden
is more important that what is on display. Behind the
“You are in a spot,” said a walking shadow that looked wall are said to be placed layers of skins of those that
like human but was a mere reflection, a talking image, didn’t qualified for the name of human, and beneath
“which occupies in the world of fancy the same position our feet are gloomy cells, which communicate with
which the exhibition, the gallery, and the museum hall the Ministry of Sexual Hygiene and Visual Order, and
do in the global commercial world. All who have affairs where sexual monsters and gender chimeras are kept
in that mystic region, which lies above, below, or beyond in confinement and fed with all unwholesomeness.”

60 PAUL B. PRECIADO
On the contrary, what was on display seemed honorable. Here there is no difference between ‘degenerate art’
In niches and on pedestals around the hall stood the and art complicit with fascism.”
statues or busts of men who in every age have been
rulers and demigods in the realms of politics and arts. I continued walking, alone and yet under the presence
The grand old countenance of Mies van der Rohe; the of the talking shadow.
shrunken and decrepit form but vivid face of Ludwig
Dettmann; the dark presence of Filippo Tommaso My foggy guide yelled, “Science is so ridiculously
Marinetti; the wild Salvador Dalí; the smile of deep- homophobic that it could well be our mother. Science
wrought mirth of Pablo Picasso; the profound, pathetic brings us into the world, licks our faces when we
humor of André Breton; the all-glorious and ever hard are born, and then rips off our skin. We, the deviant
Vito Acconci; the severe divinity of Jackson Pollock; children, have learned to call science mom. We say I,
and Carl Andre, molded of homeliest clay, but instinct we identify, we call ourselves her homosexual children,
with celestial fire: it was those that chiefly attracted her transsexual kids. But she, Medea-scientifica, has
my eye. Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor occupied already foreseen our sacrifice in the name of the norm.
conspicuous pedestals. In an obscure and shadowy Art and homophobia, science and sexual holocaust.”
niche was deposited the bust of our countryman, the
author of avant-garde and kitsch. Those words should have scared me, but instead
I felt immediately vivid and wanted to sing it: “Art
“I observe a few crumbling relics of such,” said I. “But and homophobia, phobia, phobia, science and sexual
ever and anon, I suppose, Oblivion comes with her huge holocaust, cost, cost.”
broom and sweeps them all from the marble floor. But such
will never be the fate of this fine statue of Kathy Acker.” At the edge of the hall, between two pieces of half-broken
wood, I saw an ornamental piece of crap springing, a used
“Thank Heaven,” observed my companion, as we passed bottle of milk, the liquid of which continually throws itself
to another part of the hall, “we have done with this into new shapes and snatches the most diversified lines
techy, wayward, shy, proud, unreasonable set of phallic from the stained atmosphere around. It is impossible to
laurel-gatherers. I love them in their works, but have conceive what a strange vivacity is imparted to the scene
little desire to meet them elsewhere.” by the magic dance of this fountain which by all means has
replaced the maternal bosom of Science, with its endless
“But if this is not an exhibition and what is shown is transformations, from skin into plastic, from human into
not to be praised,” asked I, “what shall be the name of cow, from milk into sperm, in which the imaginative
what is happening here?” beholder may discern what form she wills. The sperm is
supposed by some to flow from the same source as the
“There are those who call it counter-sexual gothic Uranian spring, and is extolled by others as uniting the
minimalism,” said my phantom guide. virtues of the Fountain of Youth with those of many other
enchanted wells long celebrated in tale and song. Having
While the shadow was talking to me, its smoky form started never tasted it, I can bear no testimony to its quality.
to draw shapes and become more and more human for a
second before dissolving itself into sound. And it added, “Did you ever drink this milk?” I inquired of my smoke
“The order and puritanism of social institutions is the friend.
most monstrous of aberrations. The history of modern
and contemporary art is to the scientific paradigm what “A few sips now and then,” answered the shadow. “But there
sacred art was to the paradigm of the divinity of Christ. are men here who make it their constant beverage—or,
Modern art carried out the arduous task of forging the at least, have the credit of doing so. In some instances,
aesthetics of heteropatriarchal and colonial domination. it is known to have intoxicating qualities.”

A VISIT TO H.E.N.R.I.K. O.L.E.S.E.N.’S HALL OF FANTASY 61
“Pray let us join these sperm-drinkers,” said I. me alone with just my senses at that memorable hall
of fantasy.
“Their mortal beauty! The counter-sexual artwork is
nothing but the material form of their decomposed “Upon my word,” said I, “it is dangerous to listen to
love!” said my steamy guide and walked away leaving such dreamers as these. Their madness is contagious.”

DODIE BELLAMY
THE ViolencE
OF THE Image

THE VIOLENCE OF THE IMAGE 63
Last month the 1959 low-budget monster movie favorite, The Wild One, a dancing blonde asks biker
Behemoth was on TV. I watched just the ending. The Marlon Brando, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling
Behemoth, which looks like an elongated dinosaur with against?” He bongos the top of a jukebox and snarls,
bulgy eyes, wiggles mechanically through the ocean. “Whatta ya got?” What do we “got”? That is the central
It’s way bigger than the submarine that’s trying to question facing us today. Without a focus, without a
destroy it. Wham! It bashes against the side of the specific monster in mind to boom boom boom, radical
sub and water starts leaking from an overhead pipe, enthusiasm can grind down to depression. We stop
provoking tense meaningful eye contact between the reading the news; we post pix of cats on Facebook,
two officers manning the controls. They maneuver for flowers on Instagram, obsessively checking for Likes.
a better aim. One yells, “Fire!” and the other grits his Or, like overcrowded rodents, we attack one another.
teeth and presses a plunger, unloading a bomb that
hits the monster in the head. It thrashes and sinks. I’ve got a stalker. I used to be her favorite writer, but
“That’s it?” I thought. “They killed the thing with one when I posted bad opinions in the comments box of
shot?” These days it would take at least fifteen minutes another poet’s Facebook thread, her admiration switched
of fast-cut struggle, for we citizens of the twenty-first to disdain. She instantly hated me and all I stood for,
century have learned that evil does not die easily. No even things I didn’t realize I stood for, and she began
longer is evil focused like a bad tooth you can root out an assault across social media, ridiculing and accusing
and get on with your good life. Increasingly diffuse, me. I find it difficult, today, to forgive the poets who left
the Big Scary now spreads across networks, sprouting encouraging comments for her. I felt shunned and despised,
anywhere. We have global warming; we have public like there was no love in the world for me. Presently
executions that shock without warning; we have toxic emails from online shopping sites began appearing in
waters, honey bees threatened with extinction, warnings my inbox, confirming orders I didn’t order, informing
of plague. In the White House Americans have installed me my credit card had been declined. My stalker is a
an irrational, lying, unaccountable crook who rages monster. She wouldn’t argue with this. Making herself
against “radical Islamic terrorists,” an embarrassingly into a monster makes her feel special. It is difficult for
redundant term. Isn’t radical implied in terrorist? Have the entitled to feel special. Tattoos and heavy eyeliner and
you ever heard of a middle-brow terrorist? A centrist revealing little dresses—everybody—even fat girls—has
terrorist? A give-a-cop-a-can-of-Pepsi-and-heal-the- those. She posts pictures of her ass to social media; she
world terrorist? When you’re an American, you’ve got likes pastries and favors the word “super.” My stalker is a
so much to be embarrassed about. The US has become bully. A bully can smell someone who has been previously
a very stupid country, and stupidity married to power is bullied—the bully and the bullied fit together like jigsaw
danger squared. We’ve given a buffoon the nuclear code. puzzle pieces. I imagine her alone in the middle of the
night, ashtray on her nightstand overflowing with butts,
To be radical you need a wall to bounce your radicalism drunk, or buzzed on Adderall, maybe both, afraid to sleep
off of. When you live in a soup of cover-ups, corruption, due to last night’s bout of sleep paralysis, the tension is
and general smarminess, is it possible to clear the mire unbearable—tight jaw, compacted heart—she searches
enough to even find that wall? Those on the radical for something crappy online—adds it to her shopping
left claim—and rightly so—that global capitalism is the cart, enters my name address phone number, which
enemy. But late capitalism is a slippery beast, able to she copied down the summer she interned for that
incorporate just about anything into its ravenous maw radical indie press—her taut little body vibrates as she
and spit it back out with a price tag attached. Blind, enters a fake credit card number, presses the PLACE
profit-driven virulence has infiltrated everything, its ORDER button, pummeling me with hubcaps peonies
poison creeping both inside and outside of us. The guitar strings silk sock liners—what a fucking rush what
Behemoth has swallowed the submarine and here we a release—almost as good as the burst she gets when
are, flailing in the slimy dark. In another 1950s cult she slices her inner thigh with a razor blade—it’s like

64 DODIE BELLAMY
she’s sending me all her pain, her disappointment, her

god-awful ordinariness. Afterwards she feels a terrible
intimacy, that of the torturer who comes to love her victim.
With the election of Trump, poets decided that the only

acceptable way to depict an American flag was upside
down. When a provocateur poet posted a flag right side
up on Instagram, there was an angry Facebook thread
about it. Poet A said that if he had known the flag poet
was so fucked up, he never would have had him read in
his series. Poets B and C proposed informing the flag
poet’s employer about the offense and getting him fired.
None of the poets noticed that the posted flag wasn’t a
real American flag, but the fake Chinese-made flag that
had been in the news, the one that unwitting patriots had
purchased, with too many stars. Kevin back-channeled
poet B and pointed this out: That is not the regular flag.
It has far too many stars. It is the sixty-one-star flag that
indicates the alternate history of America. Whether or
not that’s a good thing or a bad depends how you feel
about the flag today, and if you believe that the US took
a wrong turn somewhere back in history. The regular
flag has only fifty stars—supposedly for each state in
the union. However, poet B didn’t back down. He said
he couldn’t understand what a sixty-one-star flag would
signify. He said that regardless of the flag poet’s intention,
to be oblique on something this sensitive was aggressive,
and the right-side-up flag still reinscribed violence. If
one is vague, poets will project the worst into your words.
If you refer to a person but don’t name names, poets
will assume it’s themselves or someone you’d never
dream of. At Alley Cat Books the reader launches into
a poem so politically correct you could bounce a dime
off of it, political in all the right ways—and a poet in the
audience starts nodding his head wildly back and forth
as if it were a rattle. The rest of the reading he has a
normal head. Political writing is straightforward, plain,
and “learned,” prefaced by a declaration of the author’s
identity markers. As a white cis American working-class
college-educated Baby Boomer who lives in California
and prefers unoaked Chardonnay... Political writing
is careful about who owns what experience. Someone
tweets: She doesn’t have the right to talk about that,
and you feel shame. When a poet rants against me and
the politics of my writing on Facebook, she begins with

“What kind of woman would...” What kind of woman they say either he has a voice like a girl or everyone here
implies a correct, proper version of femaleness—and wishes he were dead. Tracey types on the grandmother’s
I—not being that kind of woman—have crossed over computer, “Wish you were dead, loser.” “It’s a real thrill
into an impossible otherness. It doesn’t matter what when you click that send button,” she says.
else she goes on to accuse me of, What kind of woman
has declared me an abomination. Since childhood I’ve The Internet, like late capitalism, is everywhere and
been criticized for my nonstandard female embodiment. nowhere. My stalker sends me objects that are not objects.
I was savage and unruly, clomping through life like a They’re images I keep trying to push into language.
bull—and now I’m an old white feminist—an oppressor According to capitalism, what you own you are. Lawn
in a pink pussy hat. The Facebook poet’s curses scatter plants, chenille bedspread, frilly dresses, Forest Friends
across my features like the points in facial recognition felt Christmas ornament kit, fish pond water conditioner,
software, a surveillance grid that hardens on my face hubcaps. What is the stalker saying to/about me through
like a mask. No expression is possible in the tightness these suburban talismans? According to capitalism,
of her projections. Thought criminals need to be rooted whoever controls images controls the world. I say to
out and shunned, the dead as well as the living. Cindy my psychic, I think I know who’s been stalking me, but
Sherman. Gandhi. Marjorie Perloff. Walt Whitman. I’m not sure. My psychic says, you know. How can I
And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom control these images that have been thrust upon me?
belonging to me as good belongs to you. Community walks I imagine a woman who wears floral dresses, a widow
within me and thus I contain both criminal and accuser. with a four-year-old toddler. She loved her husband
The idiocy of the American government, I contain that and always wears a peridot pendant that contains a bit
as well. In a muck of warring poets, I spew that war. of his ashes. She’s a photographer who plays the cello
Heriberto Yépez: Networks are both migrants and the and drives a motorcycle. Alone in the house she feels
gatekeepers. The madness of social media, it too walks vulnerable, so she keeps a gun under her pillow. She has
within me. I operate in the dangerous and contradictory a home office, a file box where she stores her photos.
realm of the in-between. Neither goddess nor heroine, I She’s femmy and a bit old-fashioned. She sleeps under a
am an old white feminist, a shriveled hag envious of my tufted chenille bedspread; she uses face-firming creams
stalker’s fertility and youthful beauty. My hair is coarse and bikini exfoliators. She’s trying to fix herself up to
and unkempt; my long hanging dugs bounce about like get another man. She gardens, preferring bulb plants
phalluses. I befoul Poetry with my personal essays, which from Holland—so she lives somewhere with a yard, a
are riddled with superstition, deceit, defective intelligence, rural or suburban landscape. People do not suspect
lust, and debauchery. I am simultaneously horrific and her wildness—the gun, the motorcycle—but it’s there
ridiculous. My politics are so odious I’ve made pacts with waiting to take over. She likes bargains, preferring to
rapists. Though he’s taken the form of a goat, I kiss the buy things on sale, with coupon codes or open boxes.
abuser’s backside; I apologize for him. She has a Blu-ray player to help her through her lonely
nights. Or maybe she met a man who owns a gun.
In a skit called “Silver Surfers,” Tracey Ullman plays a He’s a rebel who deserves her bikini-groomed snatch.
teacher who shows seniors how to troll the Internet. A This new man likes porn; when she’s ready he plans
woman says she’d like to see her grandson’s YouTube to share some with her on the Samsung Blu-ray player
channel. Tracey turns on a video of a grade-school boy he noticed in the living room. They sit in her garden
demonstrating something. She notes how the video is with its lush greens, irises, and peonies, holding hands,
amateurish in quality, and tells the class that when you kissing lightly, then more and more passionately. Let’s
see somebody getting it wrong online it’s important to make it the guy who has the motorcycle. He’s a Marlon
point it out to them. Tracey instructs the class to click the Brando type—a vet who’s living off of disability—going
thumbs down button—or if they want to make it more to art school in photography, and these things my
personal to post a comment, using a fake name, in which stalker ordered are gifts for him, the wheel, the gun

66 DODIE BELLAMY
cleaner, the camera. She drives a car—a fully restored

1961 Dodge Polara, which totally impresses the vet.
That’s how they met—at a light he pulled up beside
her on his motorcycle and asked her if she wanted to
grab some coffee. After the coffee, the woman and the
photographer fuck in the garden beside the koi pond,
which is mercifully devoid of chlorine fumes thanks to
Tetra Pond AquaSafe Tap Water Conditioner. Their sex
is protected from nosy neighbors by a clump of king-size
hostas. The female koi are named after female science
fiction writers, Doris Lessing, Octavia Butler; the male
fish are named after twentieth-century avant-garde
composers, Boulez, Webern. Last week raccoons ate
Ursula K. Le Guin, and before that they got Joanna
Russ and Schoenberg, so that the woman is considering
replacing the koi with a cheaper species, such as goldfish.
The vet’s cock is pink and clean, squeaky clean like the
Army taught him to keep it in their anti-VD training
videos, well-scrubbed as his gun, the barrel of which he
regularly plunges with Brownells Moly Bore Treatment
Paste. The woman’s Diane von Furstenberg dress is
pushed up to her waist. The vet pulls out his Nikon
Coolpix and shoots a close-up of the twig and gravel
scratches on her ass. The Samsung Blu-ray player blasts
“Bang a Gong.” HUBCAP DIAMOND STAR HALO.
According to capitalism, accessories are personality.
Commodities morph into character traits, morph into
narrative momentum. Personal memories and product
reviews on Amazon provide supplemental details. My
fuck scene would be more erotic if there were more of
a buildup but the woman is always ready. Too eager,
perhaps. She can come without touching herself. Her
cunt is so strong it could lift barbells, if she owned any.
Sometimes the photographer complains she’s clenching
him too tightly, but her cunt is ravenous for him, wants
to absorb every drop his cock can offer. Afterwards she
doesn’t wash, enjoying his semen smeared over her legs
and belly, dripping out of her, and besides, the stalker
hasn’t ordered her any soap.
The first target of massive Internet shaming and harassment

was Monica Lewinsky, in 1998. She was twenty-two
years old and, being the first, she had no context or
support to help her cope. These days she finds comfort
and purpose in her work with anti-harassment and

bullying organizations. Her taped phone conversations We make soup, we write tight little narratives where
with Linda Tripp are available on YouTube, hours of all messy threads are tied up, neatly, at the end. We
rambling female intimacy. I envy the closeness of the read books on organizing our home. Rooms turn vast
two women, the way they coddle the micro details of with order, with simplicity. We have only what we need,
one another’s lives—everything from the temptation of what we cherish, and there is a place for everything we
donuts at the hairdresser—Monica’s favorite is white own. Possessions are instantly findable and they are
frosting with multicolored sprinkles—to why won’t happy to serve us. The stalker destroys time, categories,
Bill call me. The conversations begin after Clinton and meaning, locking memories and dreams in the
has dumped Monica and track her heartbreak and present moment. The mind strains against the body
desperate attempts to contact him. I’d love to have a to push thoughts out. Everything is impure. The daily
girlfriend I could talk to endlessly about all my shit— taunts and jeers I experienced as a child are happening
someone as doting and supportive as Linda, someone right now right here. I’m pooping my guts out, taking
who would slather me with such love. The betrayal by slow breaths against the pain. My body is twisting my
Tripp alone would devastate anyone—and that’s just subjectivity, wringing it out like one of those old-time
a footnote to Monica’s collapse. If old white feminists washing machines my grandmother had. Whenever
ruled the world, one woman defiling another would anyone laughs they are laughing at me. The stalker
be a capital offense. has broken the frame. The process of writing this essay
creates a new frame that proves I am capable of at
On Facebook, a male poet posts a photo of a naked man least the most basic adult human functioning. How
striding down the street. In the comments section, a do you express trauma when linearity fails you? You
female poet writes she finds the photo so upsetting order products online for your enemy. When the past
her hands are shaking, and she just has to speak out. possesses the present you enter the now now now of
She’s decided the person in the photo is a mentally ill spurting adrenaline, and your irises spin like pinwheels.
homeless man—even though there is nothing in the The pix shriek nobody wants you here the pix shriek
photo or the male poet’s post that announces that. you are hated everybody hates you. I publish a piece in
Her extreme reaction to her (own) invented narrative a journal my stalker has also published in. I imagine her
prompts her to condemn the male poet and the hundred reading it with scorn, searching for bits out of context
people who liked the image. I read on the Internet that she can use to destroy me. “Dodie Bellamy said” becomes
suggesting self-control online is tone policing, and I am a tagline to ruin. On Nashville, Will, the gay character,
wrong to go there. Maybe she’s right, we’re all a bunch is being bashed on Twitter and bam! his trauma is my
of assholes laughing at the disenfranchised—or maybe trauma panic blots out the present like one of those
he’s a gay nudist—in San Francisco it’s not uncommon bags terrorists shove over a captive’s head. I am forever
to see naked men walking down the street, alone or a child useless and humiliated. I am a radiant pink clit
in groups. The photo is of the man’s back, taken at a inflamed by the eros of my stalker’s loathing.
distance, maybe he has a glittering gold tube sock stuck
on his cock. I’ve seen so many men with socks on their My stalker hates capitalism. I believe she hates capitalism
cocks—including panhandling teens on Castro Street. more than she hates me. Headline on the Internet: A
To get more money, I assume. No matter how much you majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows.
stare at the image, it refuses to cough up more clues. My stalker says that if she could have anything in the
Is it possible to keep your righteous fingers away from world she wished for, it would be to destroy capitalism.
the keyboard? Is it possible to live without diminishing My stalker believes that by shoplifting items made by
or oppressing another? Jain ascetics with soft brooms slaves in China she is fucking capitalism. When I was
made of shed peacock feathers, gently sweeping the young I’d shoplift with friends but I was too much of
ground lest they step on an insect. What are the limits a pussy to do it on my own. My friend Jackie—who
of reverence? was a pro—and I would come home with huge hauls

68 DODIE BELLAMY
of stuff, most of which I’d end up not wanting, and I

had to figure out how to get rid of. Before we went on
a run, we’d put on makeup and work dresses and little
heels; our aesthetic was clueless middle-class bargain
hunter. Jackie’s first rule: no backpacks or large purses
while shoplifting. We carried moderately sized shoulder
bags. They looked like they couldn’t hold much of
anything—but you’d be surprised. I once smashed a
fluffy pink prom dress into one. Jackie’s second rule
was entitlement. When she found a stainless steel fish
poacher she liked, she just picked it up and marched
out of Macy’s with it, and nobody blinked. Despite its
heart-thumping arousal, hours of nonstop shoplifting
was exhausting. I felt buried in commodity culture and
the treadmill of consumption that drives capitalism’s
insatiable thrust. It was gross. When Jackie and I returned
to my apartment, we dumped our haul onto my bed in
a jumbled mountain, and then we belly flopped onto
it, shrieking, carefree as dogs rolling around in shit.
One night, over a period of two hours, thirteen things

were ordered in my name, each from a different website.
Then a couple of hours later, another item, bringing
the total to fourteen in one evening. Could one person
possibly have ordered this much, this quickly? Or was
somebody throwing a Harass Dodie party? I sat down at
my desk and started emailing the companies—This order
is fraudulent. I also downloaded the product photos per
artist friend Kristina Lee Podesva’s suggestion. When
I told her about my stalker, excitement spread across
Kristina’s face and she exclaimed, “Document this!”
The order confirmations were coming in so furiously
I couldn’t keep up. I could only imagine that the
person on the other end was tweaking. I checked my
stalker’s Twitter feed. She tweeted before the ordering
frenzy began and then not again until ten or fifteen
minutes after it ended, when she wrote—My mother
just asked me if I was on heroin. A few minutes later
she tweeted—I’m reading in Philadelphia, if you come
bring me flowers—peonies. Peony bulbs were one of the
fourteen items. The world goes crazy with connection.
I say to my psychic, I think I know who it is, but I’m
not sure. My psychic says, you know. My stalker sends
me a widow’s walk and a necklace to contain the ashes
of a loved one—is she casting a spell of doom on me?

What does an office chair mean? It requires work for silhouette, rendering me not one but many. My boss
me to write back to all these companies, but it also said my best middle-class outfit was one I shoplifted
requires a hell of a lot of commitment and focused with Jackie—a navy cashmere shift by Ralph Lauren.
attention for her to order all this stuff. Her curated For the bourgeois subject, wouldn’t guilt be a more
images are about potential, about our postindustrial appropriate response than hate? Perhaps guilt is what’s
condition, in which we sit at machines pushing around really behind the attacking of those perceived politically
bytes, alone, longing to reach out. Glamour shots of impure. Like a game of tag, you spread the cooties to
merchandise hail her and she clicks them with the those not deft enough to sidestep your fingering. Anyone
grammarless fever of a rat clicking a food-delivery lever. who’s seen a zombie movie knows that when capitalism
Eventually the image objects arrive on my computer is destroyed we don’t get utopia. We get poetry bandits
and I click them with confusion and fear and anger, who police the perimeters. Law like a person has an
but also with a twinge of pleasure that reminds me of unconscious. What my stalker really wants to destroy
playing Monument Valley, my bumbling attempts to is the stink of trauma that wafts off of her.
navigate a twisting architecture whose rules endlessly
elude. Objects speak with the indeterminacy of a cry, I provide a focal point for my stalker’s hate, a manageable
garbled like puppets with their lips sewn shut. Yet it’s target for the all-consuming vastness of her rage. If
impossible not to narrativize them. To the protest, my she didn’t have me, maybe she’d jump off a bridge or
stalker wears cotton toddler panties stretched tight across shoot up a post office, who knows. It’s the middle of
her cooch. Beneath her sheer Diane von Furstenberg the night and all this pressure is trapped in her body,
dress, areolas bloom, lush pink peonies. Comrades and enormous pressure she can’t release. She wants to sigh,
government infiltrators alike find her unbearably sexy. to scream, to burst out crying. But nothing moves. Stuck
Anything you send a writer is a gift. A suicidal young in a limbo of angst, where sadness and fury are all
woman pulls up on a motorcycle. I rub her face into mucked up together, ongoing and escalating, my stalker
my desiccated crotch, suck the bloom from her cheeks looks over her list of enemies. It’s Dodie tonight. People
and cough up bile. My breath is so foul sperm curdles rarely do things just to be wicked—they act because
and young Marxists faint. I too am not a bit tamed, I they’re convinced they’ve encountered evil, convinced
too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp that innocents need protecting—or they perceive their
over the roofs of the world. livelihood is threatened—or a great wrong has been
committed against them. Throughout history, horrible
Before I became a middle-class person I shopped only at things—I don’t need to list them—have been done with
thrift stores, so the clothes I owned were jeans, striped God on our side, things that must have felt honorable at
long-sleeve tees, and party dresses. When I got my first the time, but whose cruelty today shocks us. Powerful
middle-class job, I went to Macy’s and charged these feelings can fuck you up, especially when fucked-up
awful outfits—polyester pantsuits, etc.—I looked like a you feel you have the right to fuck up others. On the
clown, a droopy professional clown. The middle class Internet I read about a guy who stalked a woman for
likes different things than the working class, but we all five years. Helen reported 125 incidents of harassment
want things things things things—even homeless people but the police did nothing until he attacked her with a
in my neighborhood wheel shopping carts and suitcases pair of scissors, stabbing her multiple times on the neck,
overflowing with things. If capitalism were destroyed, face, and back. It took a lot of googling to find out what
would the homeless have better things? The viscosity Helen did to deserve her “living nightmare.” She met
of capitalism swallows us. We are never sure if we are Joseph at a halfway house where she was recovering
inside or outside of it. It spreads over the globe making from an eating disorder. They became friends, until one
things stick together. I walk down the street wearing night Joseph asked Helen to drive him and another
bits of China India Portugal Vietnam, and occasionally friend to see a band called Carnaby Street. Helen didn’t
the USA. The ghosts of nameless workers vape from my feel up to it and said she’d text him if she changed her

70 DODIE BELLAMY
mind. Joseph felt stood up, and his affection for Helen
instantly turned into burning hatred. So he vandalized
her car, made silent phone calls, left a dead cat on her
doorstep, smashed her windows, sent her letters calling
her fat and rat-faced, spray-painted “Die Helen” across
a brick wall, nearly killed her. Because she didn’t go to
a concert. There is always a reason to destroy another.
Anybody who needs a reason will find one. I was my
stalker’s favorite writer until I posted a comment on
a poet’s Facebook thread, three years ago. Before that
I have no memory of having met her or heard of her.
Though I think that’s not true; most likely I was in
many rooms with her, rooms filled with poetry.
I learn from the Internet that mobbing should not be

confused with gang stalking. Mobbing is perpetrated by
a closed, defined group, such as an academic department
or poetry community. Gang stalking is perpetrated by
government/corporate agencies. Black vans sit outside
your apartment, trail you down the street. Satellites beam
voices into your brain via nanotechnology implanted
in your skull. The voices are relentless and abrasive.
They say everybody hates you. They urge you to harm
yourself and others. Eventually you find out you are
part of a vast government/corporate experiment whose
goal is to break people, and then through mind control
to create spies who don’t even know they’re spies. Mind
control makes the best kind of spy because no matter
how much the targeted individual is tortured, they
can’t reveal secrets they don’t know they have. Their
secrets are hidden deep within their brain behind an
altar that only the programmers know how to unlock.
The Russians have implanted nanotechnology inside
Trump’s head, and that’s why he does their bidding. The
programmers can kill you by remote control, make your
heart clench, make you vomit liters of black goo. The
whole thing’s set up to look like paranoid schizophrenia
so that targeted individuals aren’t taken seriously. But
these people hold conventions and tell their stories to
the masses via websites and YouTube videos. Vice made
a documentary about them. The psychological torture
is so intense, many targeted individuals commit suicide.
Some of them give in to the voices and go on a shooting
spree. The Internet is a cacophony of voices beaming
love or hate at you, depending on your age race gender

sexual preference body type politics. The Internet can Every piece I’ve ever written has centered around love,
gather 2,000 signatures against you overnight. You no matter how fucked up its manifestation. But this girl
can be condemned on the merest wisp of data. Even and her actions, I can find no love here to cling to, not
if you aren’t the one who committed a crime, if you even a spark. She’s like that evil queen who fed Snow
criticize mob action in the comment section of a poet’s White the poison apple. She’s a cliché of viciousness the
Facebook feed, you’re labeled an apologist and you’re Internet has birthed. I sit at the computer fortressed
just as evil as the worst rapist or racist, and young in mirrors, my eyes peering through a narrow slit. I
women you barely know will hate you forever. If you click the Mail icon. Something new has been ordered—
protest they’ll hate you even more. If you block them three jars of moly bore treatment paste. I learn on the
on Facebook they’ll condemn you for silencing them. Internet that you rub this paste on the inside of your
They’ll post screenshots of things you’ve written—out rifle barrel in order to reduce friction for minimum
of context—and since you’re old and not as online-savvy fouling, faster, easier cleanup, and longer barrel life.
you don’t know how to make each post discrete, like a My stalker posts Tinder screenshots from interested
hologram with its context imbedded within it rather guys below her league and ridicules them. She posts
than depending on other posts for context. Powerful provocative pictures of herself—flimsy teddies and
male mentors will boost their slanderous lies about wisps of panties she can pull aside in order to selfie
you and no one will come to your defense except Brian her ass—and fantasizes the FBI agents she’s sure are
Kim Stefans, who lives like a million miles away in Los surveilling her because she’s a radical are jerking off
Angeles. Locals will tell you privately they agree with to her image. When I was a child I fantasized God
you and they’re appalled by your treatment but they was watching me, and so I would do cute things for
dare not say anything. And young guys who you thought God, inspired by the TV show Candid Camera, which
were your friends will lecture you on your anti-feminist made Cold War surveillance culture fun. At any moment
behavior. There’s only one response available to any guy you could step out of ordinary life and do something
who would lecture you on feminism and that’s fuck off, adorable or amusing enough to be broadcast to all of
but still your heart breaks because you cared for them America. With earbud attached to a coiled cord that
in an age-appropriate way, as if they were cute spaniels trails from ear to back of neck and disappears into their
with big floppy ears. The poetry community you’ve been dark jackets, FBI agents are forced to observe you. It
devoted to since the early 1980s is no longer safe, and is their job to remain professional and implacable, but
even those who didn’t mob you, you see them mobbing your dirty talk on Twitter, your skimpy selfies are so
others, and this you cannot abide. On the Internet you damned seductive—flies zip open, well-scrubbed cocks
learn that when someone is directing negative energy pop out, sunglassed heads arc backwards in rapture. I
at you, you should imagine yourself covered by mirrors learn on the Internet that people who try to harm you
and bounce that negative energy back to them. You are in fact possessed by negative entities, entities that
should ground yourself by drinking chlorophyll, trace they are unaware of. Therefore I say to my stalker—You
minerals, and specially ionized water. need to ground and clear yourself because you seem
to be possessed. In your latest selfies you look awfully
By harassing me does my stalker believe she’s saving animalistic. You should drink some chlorophyll and
Poetry or is she merely a sociopath lusting for blood? wear a lead-lined hoodie to bed to protect yourself from
I read on the Internet that stalking is like a long rape. the government/corporate complex that is beaming these
Before such violence there is no place for obliqueness. terrible thoughts into your head.


73

2

WORKS

76 ARIANE MÜLLER
HEY PANOPTICON!
HEY ASYMMETRY!
Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin At Schinkel Pavillon Henrik Olesen is showing

September 20 – December 20, 2018 new works that take the specific architecture
of the pavilion as a starting point. Created in
ARIANE MÜLLER the 1950s as a kind of viewing platform for
the emerging city, Schinkel Pavillon’s nearly
360-degree view evokes the architectural
form of the panopticon. Following the analysis
of the French philosopher Michel Foucault
in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
the panopticon became a social metaphor
beyond mere architecture. It describes the
interdependent relationship between an invisible
observer and, in consequence of the architecture
of this apparatus, the greatest possible number
of observed parties. Though the observer inside
always remains invisible, the observed are well
aware of an observing presence generating
an omnipresent non-point threat of knowing
everything about everyone. In an attempt
to evade closer introspection, the observed
therefore project images of themselves for
the observer they presume to be somewhere

HEY PANOPTICON! HEY ASYMMETRY! 77
out there. Providing information about visual as well as linguistic systems of symbols,
themselves in a constant stream of unsolicited that are used to create protective barriers
confessions, they demonstrate that they are towards an observing and ever-evaluating
not doing anything in secret. Mundane everyday gaze. In a subcultural context, an off-putting,
occurrences are presented in the most vibrant disturbing image for the normative imaginary
colors for the observing gaze. What exactly (fetishes, gangsters, etc.) is established as a
ought to be confessed at any given moment kind of protective fence against an outside,
thereby remains unclear and approval from the which impulsively reacts to it with rejection.
outside becomes the only gauge while success Behind this lies what should evade an evaluative
lies in not being sanctioned. What might pass as or normalizing gaze in the first place: often
a successful image can only be assumed on this communities, aware of their own social
basis, but can no longer be assessed by oneself. precarity. Yet these methods of presentation
Therefore the observable surface everyone are consistent with codes, which as symbols
projects is not an autonomous expression but an of mutual understanding must also provide
increasingly hybrid construction of disruptions, cues as to where and how to enter into these
confessions, recanted confessions, and communities, for whose protection they exist.
apologies. Henrik Olesen’s interest is the body as both
the scene and line of demarcation for the ever-
This observation, tied to the site-specificity of shifting boundary between inside and outside.
the Schinkel Pavillon, meets in the exhibition This exhibition is thus an investigation into
with an issue that has long pervaded Henrik bodies and their surfaces in their attempt to
Olesen’s work. He is concerned with codes, appear while hiding.

1

Hey Geometry!, 2018
Hey Geometry!, 2018 (detail)

80
The Discipline and Punish Box!, 2018
Box, 2018
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

(John Ashbery Box), 2018
Naked Lunch Box, 2018


82 HEY PANOPTICON! HEY ASIMMETRY!
No Mouth No Tongue Box, 2018
Untitled, 2018
No Mouth No Tongue Box, 2018
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

(John Ashbery Box), 2018
Untitled, 2018
Pages 84-87:
Exhibition view:
Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry!,
Schinkel Pavillon, Berlín, 2018
Hey Panopticon 1, 2, 3, 5, 2018
Exhibition view:
Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry!,
Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 2018


Exhibition view: Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry!,
Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 2018
Referring to: The Master-Slave Dialectic!, 2018


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 91
Discipline and Punish, 2018
Hey Vollmilch!, 2018
Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry!

Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 2018 (detail)
Hey Panopticon! Hey Asymmetry!, 2018
Exit / Portal, 2018

92 ARIANE MÜLLER
6 OR 7 NEW WORKS
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris The German word Icht means any thing, or
April 28 – May 27, 2018 any such thing. The word has nearly vanished
in modern language, having survived only in
ARIANE MÜLLER Nichts—nothing (or no-thing), which was formed
out of the two words in (meaning no) and icht
(any such thing) as in-icht. If we subtract the
T from Icht, the Ich remains—the German
equivalent to the I. Embedded and included in
Icht, in any such thing, is the I, the inherent I
of any such thing.
The subtracted T is also the mathematical

nomen for transcendental numbers, numbers
that have been first suspected to exist by the
mathematicians Leibniz or Euler, who wrote
that there must be numbers that exceed
algebraic calculation, numbers that are
impossible to grasp. Known transcendental
numbers, proven to exist in the middle of the
19th century, are at the same time rare—the
most famous being Pi—and supposedly many,
but yet unknown, and mathematicians seemingly
wait for them to spring up somewhere. As a
rule they are irrational.
“The mathematical proof of the transcendence

of numbers allowed the proof of the impossibility
of several ancient geometric constructions
involving straightedge, and including the most
famous one, squaring the circle.” (Wikipedia)
Transcendental numbers are also performative

numbers, that extend while we calculate them.
They resemble double mirrored images, waving
at us from infinity, a glassy contingency,

6 OR 7 NEW WORKS 93
transparent, because approachable—you can of what Walter Benjamin writes about the
always start on their path, but you will not see I, and especially the I in the novels of Proust
the end—, yet caught in themselves and in their and Kafka: He writes: “When Proust, in his
own rules. On their way they never connect, but Recherche du temps perdu, and Kafka, in his
like the number Pi they sometimes play with diaries, use I, for both of them it is equally
connections, or emulate them. They sometimes transparent, glassy. Its chambers have no
seem to hide in known series of numbers, faking local coloring; every reader can occupy it today
known results of calculations but then wander and move out tomorrow. You can survey them
off on their own unruly path towards infinity. and get to know them without having to be in
the least attached to them. In these authors
The known transcendental numbers stem from the subject adopts the protective coloring of
spatial operations like squaring the circle, or the planet, which will turn grey in the coming
calculating the space under a curve, calculations catastrophes.”
which recall social operations. When they
are used—again in mathematical terms— While Henrik Olesen knows, that the
within the “ratio of integers,” they are used in protective coloring of the planet is vulnerable,
their imprecise approximations, by negating and especially today again, he is proposing
their performativity. How familiar “ratio of communities, love, and friendship, as irrational
integers” sounds. A ratio of a whole, into which agents, as incalculable Ts, and as traces on the
performativity cannot be squeezed. outside, as well as traces of the making of the
self, within its self-mirrored image.
Henrik Olesen’s exhibition at Gallery Chantal
Crousel is not a linguistic operation at which The work of Henrik Olesen (born 1967 in
this text may seem to hint, but what lies in the Denmark, and living in Berlin) is based on
practice of opposing concepts, of mirroring sculpture and collage, dealing with techniques
them into their embedded infinity. It is about of the self, narrations of abstraction, and
things opposed to bodies, as is sculpture at sexuality. His work develops within work-blocs,
its core, adding an irrational that very simply including language, poetry, and text, discussing
distorts space. thereby the spatial appearance of language as
body. In his first solo exhibition in France, at
I also see them in the concepts of the Ichts, Galerie Chantal Crousel, he presents 6 or 7 new
these Is in their bodily presence sent into the works, at the same time work-blocs, hermetic
incalculability of time, where their existence in themselves, and interconnected between
performs as a screen for projections, each other, through a narration of identities,
identifications and feelings, being reminded as things, as icons, and as spaces.

Pages 94–95: Hand-painted Surfaces, 2018 (process)
Hand-painted Surfaces 2, 2018
Hand-painted Surfaces 1, 2018 (detail)

Pages 100–101: Exhibition view: 6 or 7 new works,

Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, 2018

103
As Yet Untitled 9, 2018

As Yet Untitled 3, 2018 (process)
Depression 2, 2018

6 OR 7 NEW WORKS 105

106 HENRIK OLESEN
FORMLESS

FORMLESS 107

110 Pages 108–109:
Pink view / Horizontal frame, 2017 (detail)
Double frame I, 2017
Installation view: Cabinet, London, 2017
Bent frame, 2017 (detail)
Single frame, 2017 (detail)
Exhibition view: Cabinet, London, 2017 (details)
Pink view / Horizontal frame, 2017 (detail)

111

112
Pink view / Horizontal frame, 2017
Red angle, 2017

FORMLESS 113

114

Exhibition views: Cabinet, London, 2017

116 HENRIK OLESEN
HOW DO I MAKE
MYSELF A BODY?

118

HOW DO I MAKE MYSELF A BODY? 119

Pages 117–119: How Do I Make Myself a Body?, 2008 (details)
A.T., 2012 (detail)
Some Illustrations to the Life of Alan Turing, 2008/2019 (detail)

122
Agent (Shoe), 2008

Exhibition view: How Do I Make Myself a Body?,
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2008
2.87 x 3.98, 2008

Imitation / Enigma, 2008

Apple (Ghost), 2008
Invitation card for the exhibition How Do I Make

Myself a Body?, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2008
Pages 124–127: Some Illustrations to the Life

of Alan Turing, 2008/2019 (details)

128 JOHN KELSEY
ST. GEORGE & THE DRAGON
Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York St. George endured various torture sessions
January 24 – February 28, 2016 including laceration upon a wheel of swords,
where he was resuscitated three times before
JOHN KELSEY his execution by decapitation. The myth of
St. George and the Dragon (killed in Beirut)
returned with the crusaders following exploits
in the Middle East. Made of plywood and
found scrap metal, the “dragon” here takes
the form of a famous Anthony Caro sculpture
(Early One Morning, 1962, which belongs to the
Tate Britain). Some interpretations of the St.
George myth understand dragon slaying less as
a killing than as an internal struggle, against
ourselves and the evil among us. George is
a military saint, armed against Satan and
himself, self-decapitating (his lance was called
Ascalon, also the name of Winston Churchill’s
personal aircraft during World War II). As the
patron saint of England, he is also represented
in the form of a red cross upon a silver or white
background: the St. George’s Cross inside the
Union Jack. We can’t finally decide if the fake
Caro is a war machine or a torture device, but
its vermillion abstraction is already performing

ST. GEORGE & THE DRAGON 129
and misbehaving as a figure within a sort and seem to seek a wilder, lighter combination.
of mythic space. Reclaiming the silvered walls and floor left
over from Merlin Carpenter’s last exhibition
For his second exhibition at the gallery, here (Hands Against Hands, which followed
Henrik Olesen employs the color red, forms Stephan Dillemuth’s exhibition The DAMNED,
suggesting crosses, flags and arms, images both 2015), Olesen pushes the bad Factory
of hanging meat taken from the Internet décor closer to the look of a walk-in meat locker.
and collaged onto used plastic drop cloths, Stock images of animal carcasses are printed
the head of George Harrison, sculptural and out and collaged to plastic sheeting: a flimsy,
painterly abstraction in the modernist style formalist, serial flesh becomes a kind of writing
and, by way of a starting point, the opening in the space. In the Inferno, the descent into
lines of Dante’s Inferno… Hell is also an ascent toward God. Everything
here seems to seek displacement, changing
Midway upon the journey of our life senses and direction, abstraction wandering into
I found myself with a forest dark, figuration, bodies becoming signs, as an artistic
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. practice attempts to open itself toward further,
unscripted options. The installation, produced
The Caro/dragon/machine could also be a entirely on site, is a kind of theatrical machine
Gate to Hell, marking the point at which a life playing out a torture session whose purpose is
becomes confused or where confusion becomes to generate fresh momentum. (Arab Christians
a sort of guide or way forward. Staging a believe that St. George can restore mad people
confusion that is both existential and formal/ to their senses: to say that a person has been
aesthetic, Olesen displaces European signs and sent to St. George’s is equivalent to saying
images to Chinatown, where they pick up energy he’s been sent to a madhouse.)

130 Installation view: St. George & The Dragon,
Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, 2016
“1”, 2016 (detail)

ST GEORGE & THE DRAGON 131

ST. GEORGE & THE DRAGON 133
“7”, 2016 (detail)
“2”, 2016
Installation views: St. George & The Dragon,

Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, 2016

134
“4”, 2016
“8”, 2016
Installation views: St. George

& The Dragon, Reena Spaulings
Fine Art, New York, 2016

137
“1”, 2016
“1”, 2016 (detail)
“5”, 2016
“6”, 2016
Installation views: St. George

& The Dragon, Reena Spaulings
Fine Art, New York, 2016

138 MARK VON SCHLEGELL
DHALGREN
Galerie Buchholz, New York Dear

January 25 – March 5, 2016
There is nothing to do but read. That is to say
MARK VON SCHLEGELL I want to write but can fix with words only the
desire itself…
As you might have heard, I have 2 exhibitions in

Sycophitic City, opening the same day. It is a little
eccentric, I know. One show is opening at the
B__ gallery uptown, and one is opening in New
Chinatown at __. The show at __ is still not done.
I will work here in the space for the next month …
still a long way to go…
… We have only now heard the news of David’s

passing. This changes everything. The exhibition
uptown was to be installed on the remnants of
the former exhibition. I would return the walls to
their original formation. The space itself would
not be otherwise renovated. The walls would not
be painted; they would hold holes, traces, and
living bacteria from that very interesting show.
In this one of two events, I had pictured a two-

pronged arrangement. Two sets of novelties
within two against the chaos of these times.

DHALGREN 139
1. “Corners” Site specific works, consisting I’m sorry. I observe a new mechanics. I am the
of negative casts of the proliferation of wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing
corners in the gallery. I imagined this, as the present. I resort to honesty; I employ cut-
you know, pictured from above. ups, of the interventionist Burroughsian sort.
Dhalgren came out in ’75. What a year for
2. “After Dhalgren ’75” Wall pieces. faggots that was. And we took down Nixon too.
But man was no longer on the moon and we
didn’t understand that yet as the parabolic fact
Here things become more poignant. My Lord it proved to be. Our culture shooting outwards
how incredibly prescient that text seems today. and up had hit the nadir. And now we see it is
How that city of possible nomads Bellona falling down upon us. First step, indeed. The
was the exact opposite of 1970s Manhattan, whole exhibition was going to look the way
mirrorwise? And how now I had thought of words looked in those days. Or how they did on
introducing it into an entirely more different sort that particularly spectacular cover when it first
of different New York? I once figured it was San found me.
Francisco. Katherine Mansfield once described
San Francisco, in a letter to Murray, as living And who exactly else would have remembered
on the inside of a pearl. Because of all the fog. these corners; these points of no return invisible
Well it seems I only introduced it to itself, after at the time? Kidd never cared about the previous
all, or meant to. New York in those days was its occupants of the hallways he explored. His
opposite, or shall we say its own facing, point Bellona was a city that cared not about its
of reference. The Genovese family owned the past, whose squatters were the current scene.
Stonewall Inn. The burning city squatted on They made their poems from within, made each
weak, inverted images of its fires. What moved corner its own.
became smoke, lobbling from a windowsill set
with glass teeth like an extinguished jack-o- Is this nostalgia? To those from the Age of Hogg,
lantern. we say search the smoke for the fire’s base.

140 MARK VON SCHLEGELL
Read from the coals neither success nor despair. and that ear-ring—but it strikes us as odd as it
We say try Dhalgren. This edge of boredom is as does him. We had to assume it was Samuel R.
bright. This is the deceiving warmth that asks Delany himself beaming into his character’s
nothing. And look what we’re left with today. brain through a mirror, straight from Edgar A.
What use can any of us have for two moons? Poe’s 1844 Extra Sun. So yeah that must have
The miracle of order has run out. This circle in been it. He was looking for that notebook all
all, this change in changing winterless, a dawn along, creating this whole book in that process.
circle with an image of, an autumn change with
a change of mist. Except for this new small matter of it being a
“late draft” in a notebook in which nothing was
Did you hear that story that SRD lost an original actually lost….
notebook of a late draft in San Francisco? I read
it in my old papers. Or was it AskJeeves? I won’t Well that returns us only to our mirror I’m
even say where I found it. This is so strange, but afraid. As to whom Kidd sees reflected in instead
in the interview it’s treated like nothing: of himself, why it must only be One rather
despicable beast of a man altering that world
INTERVIEWER: Forty years ago, when you were which he could possibly see. So it is said by some.
traveling on the West Coast, you lost a notebook Others compare him to a second moon impossibly
with some forty-two pages of a late draft of beheld in the sky behind our own. It’s he who
Dhalgren. What was it like to reconstruct the is seen there, either way. Remember? George
novel? Did the story change as a result? Harrison is the author of the real notebook.
DELANY: I plan things out pretty meticulously. You know, George Harrison, the big colored
It was simply three weeks of hard, boring work, man? On the corner, wearing black-framed
re-creating the lost pages. If the National eighty- glasses [my italics], workshoe heels wedged in a
page spiral notebook had ever turned up in the deep tenon, elbows on the knees of soiled khaki
back balcony of the Empire theater on Market coveralls, and reading The Times, sat George
Street in San Francisco, where inadvertently Harrison. Big Brother himself (and a small brass
I’d left it, many of the paragraphs would be, I ring in one ear!). On a billboard, some six by
suspect, all but word-for-word identical with the sixteen feet, George Harrison, naked, in near
reconstructed version of the book. silhouette before a giant lunar disk, craned his
head to search or howl or execrate the night.
Well that’s interesting. For we couldn’t help George Harrison as the moon. George in cycle
wondering of course when we were reading it if it drag. George in the forest. The three aspects of
might be the author’s own notebook which Kidd George. I remember you telling me he was the
finds, keeps and transforms into poetry. But now very opposite of G-d. You attached every horrible
that doesn’t make sense on several levels. Almost thing to him. You asked: “Why—I still don’t
nothing now makes sense. Remember that scene understand—are you so hung up on him?”
in the department store when Kidd seemingly
saves the day in a conflict started for no reason Shortly after midnight, the moon and
that has no particular outcome whatsoever, something called George, easily enough
except this one: He sees himself in the mirror? to mistake for a moon, shone briefly on
Bellona. Well now you see, don’t you?
Kidd’s not at all as we expect, or he expects George Harrison as the new moon.
either (though of course we accept that from a George in the light of an extra sun.
character who can’t remember his own name).
I mean there’s only really a beard and glasses Citations from Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren, 1975 et al.

DHALGREN 141
Invitation card for the exhibition Henrik Olesen, Galerie Buchholz, New York, 2016

142 NARRATIVES, 1. ST GEORGE & THE DRAGON, 2. DHALGREN

DHALGREN 145
Pages 142–143:
After Dhalgren I, 2015
After Dhalgren II, 2015
After Dhalgren III, 2015
After Dhalgren IV, 2015

Untitled, 2017 (detail)
Poster for the exhibition After Dhalgren,

Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, 2016

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren,
Vintage Books, New York, 2001 (left);
Bantam Books, New York, 1975 (right)
Untitled, 2017

DHALGREN 149
After Dhalgren,
2015 (details)

150

DHALGREN 151
After Dhalgren, 2015 (details)

After Dhalgren,
2015 (detail)
Self-Production, 2017–19
Installation view: CCA Wattis Institute for
Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 2017
Pages 154–155:
Addressing The Men of Darkness, 2016
Exhibition view: The Euphoria of Turin,
Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, 2016

DHALGREN 153

155

156 NIKOLA DIETRICH
CONVERSATION IN A
YES/NO LANDSCAPE
Deborah Schamoni, Munich

July 29 – October 8, 2016
NIKOLA DIETRICH

CONVERSATION IN A YES/NO LANDSCAPE 157
Insect Incest
This exhibition is the first time Gerry Bibby and forms take on a more explicitly linguistic
Henrik Olesen have collaborated, beginning a turn, where different attitudes can be worn
few months ago in Porto. Now it continues in the performatively in this Yes/No landscape: “when
gallery of Deborah Schamoni. As part of a longer all is said and done,” “yes/no future,” “what
process, works have been developed that can is empathy?”
be embedded into different scenarios within a
specific Yes/No landscape. Within these, various The garden view and the back-side of the
constructed social landscapes appear for which delineated space the work No Wall reveals,
images were created that follow direct or posits that the end of this road offers
fictional-narrative traces and signs. up a beginning, mirroring the Versatile?
room upstairs, where the poetics of the
Street is the title of the first room, setting the representational echo chambers downstairs
scene, giving direction for play with variable recede and the view of the street—or garden—
rhetorical and material possibilities throughout outside the gallery is unimpeded, albeit framed.
the exhibition. It first appears as a simple
graphic, painted, image, in which an initially An uncertainty in intersecting perceptions
stumbled upon—literally—street view has been and attitudes here calls to force a productive
flipped from the horizontal into the vertical. interference in this system, where potentially
The black and white motif initiates a series of new ideas can be addressed. In the words of
inversions and shifts which become analogous Paul B. Preciado, this could constitute a kind of
to closed structures like positive/negative, yes/ “fiction politics,” where “footprints cannot be
no, outside/inside, vertical/horizontal. On the followed, but instead have to be invented.”*
rendered hard asphalt, paths and perspectives
cross. This is a road to a rather fictional, mental
space in which conversation and exchange might
* In “Gender and Performance Art: Three Episodes from
take place.
a Feminist Queer Trans Cybermanga…,” (2004), Beatriz
Preciado addresses the impasse that is encountered
In the second room Sprache (Language) is taken when attempting to recall and make affinities with queer
performance strategies that have been omitted from
up as title and motif, onto which multiple levels
historical accounts, suggesting that such an absence might
of meaning can be projected, set inside another allow an imagined space that invites the production of more
representational background. This time intimate interrelations in the now.

158

Fernseher (Television), 2016
Yes/No Future, 2016
Installation view:
Deborah Schamoni, Munich, 2016
Fernseher (Television), 2016

Autobahn (Highway), 2016
Grosses Kaugummi (Big Chewing Gum), 2016
Installation view:

Zebrastreifen (Crosswalk), 2016
Invitation card for the exhibition

Conversation in a Yes/No Landscape,
Installation view:
Tongue, 2016
Installation views:



Un captif amoureux, 2016
Power Line, 2016

Installation view: Deborah Schamoni, Munich, 2016

164 HENRIK OLESEN
HELL







Pages 165–173:
No Tongue, 2016 (detail)
No Foot, 2016 (detail)
No Arm, 2016 (detail)
No Arm, 2016 (detail)
Exhibition view: The Walk,
Wattis Institute, San Francisco, 2017
No Leg, 2016

HELL 175
Pages 175–179: Inferno, 2016

HELL 177



HELL 181
Goat 1, 2, 3, 2012
Inferno, 2016
Installation view: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, 2016
Monogram / Natures Morte, 2012

Installation view: dépendance, Brussels, 2012

182 HENRIK OLESEN
SOME FAGGY GESTURES

Pages 183–187: Information on Some Gay-Lesbian Artists (or Artists Relevant to Homo-Social
Some Gay-Lesbian Artists Relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between Culture) in the Format of the Daily Mail, October 17, 2004, 2006
c. 1300–1870
I – The Appearance of Sodomites in Visual Culture / Monsters and Sodomites / Invitation card for the exhibition Henrik Olesen, MD 72, Berlin, 2007
Anti-Homosexual Trials / Bodies, 2007
II – Fathers / Masculinity / Dominance / Violence / Bondage / Bodies / Some Gay-Lesbian Artists Relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between
Männerfreundschaften, 2007 c. 1300–1870
VII – London Goth / Paris Femmes / American Dykes in Rome / New York
1810–25, 2007 (detail)
Exhibition view: The Keeper, New Museum, New York, 2016
Exhibition view: Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and / or Artists Relevant to

Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870 / Sex-Museum 2005–2007,
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, 2007
Information on Some Gay-Lesbian Artists (or Artists Relevant to Homo-Social

Culture) in the Format of the Daily Mail, October 17, 2004, 2006

SOME FAGGY GESTURES 189

190 HENRIK OLESEN
MR. KNIFE
AND MRS. FORK
THE MUSEO NACIONAL 1.a. My dear Mother

CENTRO DE ARTE My dear Father
REINA SOFÍA PRESENTS 1.b. I hate to seem inquisitive but
MR. KNIFE AND MRS. FORK could you kindly tell me who I am?
1.c. Lord save me, says I,

(Apropos reproduction)
1.d. I don’t believe in Father
in Mother
2.a. I don’t believe in Father

in Mother
Got no papa-mummy
2.b. My dear Father My dear Mother
My dear Brother
Please forgive me
2.c. I am not my Father, my Mother

my Son, Myself
2.d. ... And yet it is precisely this world
of Father + Mother which must go away
3.a. Farewell
My dear Mother
Please forgive me, says I
3.b. Farewell
My dear Father
Farewell

MR. KNIFE AND MRS. FORK 191
3.c. .... it is precisely this world of Father + 5.c. Farewell Farewell

Mother which must go away, Goodbye Hand Goodbye Wrist Goodbye Hip
it is this world, split in two–doubled in Goodbye Chin Goodbye Knee Goodbye Head
a state of constant disunion, also willing Goodbye Lip Goodbye Mouth Goodbye Nose
a constant unification... around which Goodbye Nostril Goodbye forehead
turns the entire system of this world 5.d. My dear Father
maliciously sustained by the most My dear Mother
somber organization Please forgive me
3.d.
6.a. Lord save me, thinks I

4.a. O Mother Self-reproduction
O Mother 6.b. Self-production, says I
Farewell Produce your own body
With a long black shoe
Farewell 6.c. My dear Father My dear Mother
4.b. No Mother No Mouth No Tongue No Teeth Please forgive me, says I
No Larynx No Oesophagus No Belly No Anus 6.d. When you will have made yourself
a body without organs,
4.c. No Mother No Mouth No Tongue then you are delivered from all your
4.d. No Mouth No Tongue No Teeth No Larynx automatic reactions and restored
No Oesophagus No Belly No Anus to your true freedom.
5.a. No Father No Legs No Arm No Feet No Eyes 7.a. Self-production, says I

No Belly No Thumb No Elbow No Fist Produce your own body
No Finger No Buttocks No Hair No Anus 7.b. then you are delivered from all your
5.b. How could this body have been produced automatic reactions and restored
by parents, when by its very nature to your true freedom.
it is such eloquent witness of its own
self-production? 7.c. Produce your own body

192 HENRIK OLESEN
7.d. Face Neck Breast Spleen Face Liver Arms 9.c. A natural bent, no doubt
Feet Stomach Pelvis Genitals Thighs Calves 9.d. (Poem to the hole in the ass)
Thumb Elbow Fist Finger Ankle Hip Hand Dark and puckered like a violet rose it pulse,
Arm Wrist Hair Chin Mouth Nose Nostril humbly hidden amidst the moss. Still damp
Thigh Ear Elbow Waist Shoulder Cheek from love that trickles oft along white
Belly Anus Thumb Tooth Tongue Toe ETC thighs to its lips. Fecit.
Little drops like tears of milk have wept,
beneath the zephyr blowing cruel. Upon the
pebbles of auburn marl.
8.a. A false nose to look less pathetic Obeying the slope and heeding its call.
A stink bomb to a friend with bad breathe
8.b. A natural bent, no doubt
8.c. Bent forward, he thunders!

8.d. Tangle, which sweaty underarm escapes?
Bent forward, he thunders!
Sibie screams out,
by nature immensely,
Hemiglobes upwards.
Now-burning pedal brushes (delightful!)
an elsewhere-caressed
Abdomen. An omen.
Unsurpassed licks his lingua fattest thighs
along, Isodor.
9.a. Farewell
My dear Mother
My dear Father
Please forgive me, says I
9.b. Better sleep with a sober cannibal
than a drunken Christian.

P.S. Cigarren [elementar]
Cigarren
Ci
garr
ren
Ce
i
ge
err
err
een
Ce
CeI
CeIGe
CeIGeA
CeIGeAErr
CeIGeAErrEr
CeIGeAErrErr
CeIGeAErrErr
ErrEEn
EEn
En
Ce
i
ge
a
err
err
e
en
CI
garr
ren
Cigarren (Der letzte Vers wird gesungen.) Kurt Schwitters

Pages 194–197: Exhibition view: Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork.
Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2012, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2012
Papa-Mama-Ich [Dad-Mom-Me], 2009
Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork. Portrait of My Father, 2009
Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork. Portrait of My Mother, 2009
Exhibition views: Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, Studio Voltaire, London, 2018

Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork. Portrait of My Father, 2009 (detail)

Exhibition view: Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, Studio Voltaire, London, 2018
Studio Voltaire Presents Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, 2009

202 ARIANE MÜLLER
HYSTERICAL MEN
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin I report that on one beautiful morning, I am not

September 20 – November 23, 2013 sure at exactly what time, as the desire to take a
walk came upon me, I put my hat on my head, left
ARIANE MÜLLER my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran
down the stairs to hurry out into the street.
So begins Robert Walser’s novella The Walk and

the sentence is found, with two further passages
from the same piece, right at the start of Henrik
Olesen’s exhibition—so to say, in the very foyer.
Robert Walser’s man on a walk sets on his way,
immediately meeting a Spanish-looking lady and
then, directly afterwards, Professor Mehli, who
consists of walking stick, nose, eyes, and hat.
These all being very meaningful parts of the
Professor, each of which having their own story,
each of which offering further consideration,
until something new that he sees wrenches the
man on the walk from such thoughts.
Henrik Olesen sends the gallery visitor on a walk

as well.—In the hallway, one quick last glance in
the mirror. Everything is still there. Then around
the corner, then around this way and likewise
one is greeted immediately with a number of
acquaintances, faces which ring up names,
people of whom one knows a thing or two. Now
one begins to tell the stories of these people to
oneself. However, before one loses oneself too
far in thought, something comes—as it is, when
one is on a walk—in between. Another picture, a
detail reminding of something else, one relates
it perhaps to the previous picture and continues

HYSTERICAL MEN 203
on. One could wander into dark thoughts—after sinister enough, Olesen’s picture becomes
all, several of the people are dead or jailed—but ever more bleak the further in the beholder
precisely this is not Henrik Olesen’s intention, progresses on the walk. But here too, as if in
and so he suggests, at least in thought, to free consolation, one sees, way up on the right, at the
the pictures from prison by walking on one’s end of the roll of paper, where the writing begins
head for a time. So Dominique Strauss-Kahn again, Hanne Darboven pictured, because, to
tips over and turns upside down. Henrik’s joy, she signed her last works together
with Mickey, her goat.
The pictures develop through walking. Henrik
Olesen sets the direction, like in writing, At the end of the walk, Henrik Olesen has
letting the lines fall off to the right. For us, he changed a doorway into a walk-in closet. Seen
disassembles the pictures to fragments and from the hallway, it appears as though one of
pieces them back together again. This he does the two doors has disappeared into the big
with an unbelievably generous spirit, forcing exhibition room—on the other side it continues,
no one to think towards a certain someplace, but the other entrance is gone. One enters the
insisting on nothing. To keep the beholder from closet through a door that has been rehung and
becoming sad, he or she is given a comb as a gift. initially came from the bourgeois apartment
You can make this kind of comb into a mustache the gallery once was. Apparently such a closet
by hanging it under your nose. is easily incorporated into such a facility of the
bourgeoisie—it looks as though it has always
Hysterical Men 1 and 2, both pictures emerge been there, yes, even as though it were one of
from pictures already present, all actually the founding elements, and if one did not know
part of reality, but Henrik Olesen doesn’t want it had been installed it would perhaps remain
the pictures ordered so as they are normally hidden, as it is in all forms interior, whereas
presented to us and reorders, finds details, the T-shirts were at first Henrik Olesen’s
dashes them in lines, then remembers one thing, contribution to an exhibition in public space and
and places it somewhere else. The hands here, herewith perhaps the body being thought of
the feet there. This is actually only logical as public space, in any case, one carries them
(says he). about on the body in public space. Printed upon
them are simple illustrations of six separate
As the stories of power, betrayal, sexual categories of Sex, whereby here too a screw
hierarchy and morals we know from these is turned one rotation tighter than can be
people, rather some of these pictures, are described by this text in its offered brevity.

HYSTERICAL MEN 205
Self Sex, 2013 (detail)
Hysterical Men 1, 2013 (detail)

207
Der Spaziergang (The Walk), 2013

Exhibition views: Hysterical Men, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2013

Hysterical Men, T-Shirts, 2013
Exhibition view: Hysterical Men, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2013
Invitation card for the exhibition Hysterical Men, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2013
Exhibition view: Hysterical Men, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2013

209

HYSTERICAL MEN 211
A dentist told my father that he would

soon lose all his teeth because of the
violence of his bite, 2013
Exhibition view: Hysterical Men,

55th Venice Biennale, 2013

LIST OF WORKS

Lack of Information SOME GAY-LESBIAN ARTISTS HOW DO I MAKE MYSELF MR. KNIFE AND MRS. FORK
2001–19 RELEVANT TO HOMO-SOCIAL A BODY?
195 inkjet prints on photo paper CULTURE BORN BETWEEN El Museo Nacional Centro de
and 162 printed texts on yellow C. 1300–1870 Agent (Shoe) Arte Reina Sofía presenta al
paper 2008 Sr. Cuchillo y a la Sra. Tenedor
220 x 600 cm I – The Appearance of Sodomites Male black shoe (The Museo Nacional Centro
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ in Visual Culture / Monsters and 10 × 27 × 9.5 cm de Arte Reina Sofía Presents
Cologne/New York Sodomites / Anti-Homosexual A. Schröder Collection, Berlin Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork)
p. 28 Trials / Bodies p. 122 top 2008
Collage and prints on paper Booklet, 4 pp.
Pre-Post Speaking Backwards over cardboard Apple (Ghost) pp. 190–193
2006 140 x 600 cm 2008
Booklet, 16 pp. Migros Museum für Computer, plastic foil, and Museum Ludwig Presents
29.5 × 21 cm Gegenwartskunst Collection packaging foil Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ pp. 183–185 50 × 40 × 60 cm 2009
Cologne/New York A. Schröder Collection, Berlin Cardboard box, cutlery, and jar
II – Fathers / Masculinity / p. 123 top 32.3 × 40 × 17 cm
Dominance / Violence / Bondage / Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Loan
Bodies / Männerfreundschaften How Do I Make Myself a Body? Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst
Collage and prints on paper 2008–19 am Museum Ludwig Köln e.V.
over cardboard 19 collages 2012, Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2012
140 x 600 cm 14 x 10 cm each pp. 194–195
Migros Museum für Exhibition copy
Gegenwartskunst Collection Statens Museum for Kunst, Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork. Angle
pp. 186–187 Copenhagen 2009
pp. 117–119 Wood, paint, and nails
III – Some Faggy Gestures 159.3 × 6.8 × 4.3 cm
Collage and prints on paper Imitation / Enigma Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Loan
over cardboard, 2 stuffed 2008 Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst
chickens and 1 stuffed cock Cardboard, tape, rope, padding am Museum Ludwig Köln e.V.
140 x 600 cm material, and blanket 2012, Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2012
Migros Museum für 60 × 100 × 30 cm
Gegenwartskunst Collection A. Schröder Collection, Berlin Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork.
p. 123 top Self-Production
IV – The Effeminate Son / 2009
Out of the City into the Woods / Schraubenzieher Branch, marker, and nails
Cruising / Bath / Sex in America / (Screwdriver) 211.7 × 14.5 × 4 cm
Subculture 2008–19 Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Loan
Collage and prints on paper Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst
over cardboard Cologne/New York am Museum Ludwig Köln e.V.
140 x 600 cm 2012, Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2012
Migros Museum für Some Illustrations to
Gegenwartskunst Collection the Life of Alan Turing Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork. Sock
2008/2019 2009
V – American Male Bodies / Inkjet print on newsprint Cotton sock
English Lads / Melancholy 16 parts, 33 × 48 cm each 13 × 30 cm
Collage and prints on paper Exhibition copy Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Loan
over cardboard Wolfgang Tillmans, Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst
140 x 600 cm Berlin/London am Museum Ludwig Köln e.V.
Thea Westreich Wagner and pp. 121, 124–127 2012, Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2012
Ethan Wagner Collection
p. 189 Some Illustrations to Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork.
the Life of Alan Turing Portrait of My Father
VI – Female Societies / Amazons / 2008/2019 2009
Myths / Women’s Baths / Girl’s 4 collages Wood (2 pieces), paint, screws,
Rooms / Lesbian Visibility / Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ and jar
Woman’s Portraits by Female Cologne/New York 111.7 × 4.4 × 6.8 cm /
Artists 96.6 × 4.4 × 6.8 cm
Collage and prints on paper Spoon Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Loan
over cardboard 2008–19 Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst
140 x 600 cm Silver spoon am Museum Ludwig Köln e.V.
Thea Westreich Wagner and Exhibition copy 2012, Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2012
Ethan Wagner Collection Wolfgang Tillmans, pp. 198, 200
Berlin/London
VII – London Goth / Paris Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork.
Femmes / American Dykes Portrait of My Mother
in Rome / New York 1810–25 2009
Collage and prints on paper Wood, paint, and screws
over cardboard 177.4 × 6.7 × 4.3 cm
140 x 600 cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Loan
Thea Westreich Wagner and Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst
Ethan Wagner Collection am Museum Ludwig Köln e.V.
p. 188 bottom 2012, Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2012
p. 199
Shoe
Male black shoe and stone Portrait of My Father Sleeping
12 × 32 × 12 cm 2009
Thea Westreich Wagner and Wood and pillow
Ethan Wagner Collection 200 × 50 × 18 cm
A. Schröder Collection, Berlin

I WILL NOT GO TO WORK THE MASTER- CONVERSATION IN HELL
TODAY. I DON’T THINK I WILL SLAVE-DIALECTIC A YES/NO LANDSCAPE 2016
GO TOMORROW 2016
Untitled #03 Henrik Olesen and Gerry Bibby No Arm
I Will Not Go to Work Today. 2011 Acrylic, oil, marker, and masonite
I Don’t Think I Will Go Tomorrow Screws and nails on canvas Autobahn 210 × 193 cm
(Machine Assemblage I) 165 × 165 cm (Highway) Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
2010 Pinault Collection Paint on carpet Cologne/New York
Disassembled 17″ PowerBook G4 p. 50 167.6 × 109.8 × 71.7 cm pp. 170–171
mounted on 5 Perspex panels Deborah Schamoni
1 panel: 150 × 200 cm / Untitled #04 p. 159 No Foot
4 panels: 80 × 100 cm each 2011 Acrylic, oil, marker, and masonite
Bobby and Eleanor Cayre Screws and nails on canvas Fernseher 210 × 193 cm
Collection 165 × 165 cm (Television) Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
pp. 40 middle, 42, 43 Pinault Collection Paint on carpet and chewing gum Cologne/New York
110 × 110 cm p. 168
I Will Not Go to Work Today. Untitled #05 Deborah Schamoni
I Don’t Think I Will Go Tomorrow 2011 pp. 158, 159 No Leg
2010 Screws and nails on canvas Acrylic, oil, marker, and masonite
Prints on A4 paper 165 × 165 cm Grosses Kaugummi 220 × 210 cm
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Pinault Collection (Big Chewing Gum) Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
Cologne/New York Paint on carpet, chewing gum, Cologne/New York
The Body of The Master and steel p. 174
Portraits / Alphabet 2019 180 × 180 cm
2011/2019 Wood, cast, and paint Deborah Schamoni No Tongue
Prints on paper 172 × 144 × 30 cm p. 159 Inkjet print, self-adhesive film,
11 pieces, 29.7 × 21 cm each Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ marker, acrylic, oil, and masonite
Exhibition copy Cologne/New York Power Line 243 × 210 cm
Norman and Norah Stone Wood, paint, and cable Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
Collection, San Francisco 250 × 140 × 35 cm Cologne/New York
Deborah Schamoni pp. 165–167, 169
p. 163
Inferno
Tongue Inkjet print, self-adhesive film,
Wood and lacquer marker, acrylic, oil, and masonite
30 × 112 × 250 cm 210 × 830 cm
Deborah Schamoni Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
p. 161 Cologne/New York
pp. 175–179, 180 bottom
Zebrastreifen
(Crosswalk)
Paint on both sides of a carpet,
steel, and aluminum
150 × 260 cm
Deborah Schamoni
p. 160 top

ST. GEORGE & THE DRAGON AS YET UNTITLED HAND-PAINTED SURFACES HEY PANOPTICON!
2016 2018 2018 HEY ASYMMETRY!
“1” As Yet Untitled 1 Hand-painted Surfaces 1 Box 1

Wood, paint, and text Glass, glue, metal brackets, Cardboard, paint, and table 2018
190 × 28 × 21.5 cm and paper 87 × 140 × 70 cm Silkscreen on wood, acrylic paint,
Scott Cameron Weaver 45 × 61 × 20.5 cm Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ inkjet print on paper and plexiglas
Collection, O-Town House, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Cologne/New York 32 × 39 × 32 cm
Los Angeles Cologne/New York pp. 97 bottom, 98 Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
pp. 131, 136, 137 top pp. 103 bottom, 104 bottom Cologne/New York
Hand-painted Surfaces 2
“2” As Yet Untitled 2 Cardboard, paint, and table Box 2
Wood, metal, paint, and text Glass, glue, silicone, metal 81.5 × 140 × 70 cm 2018
on paper brackets, and paper Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Silkscreen on wood, acrylic paint,
600 × 226 × 240 cm 61 × 45 × 20.5 cm Cologne/New York inkjet print on paper and plexiglas
Scott Lorinsky Collection Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ pp. 96, 99 32 × 39 × 32 cm
p. 133 Cologne/New York Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
p. 102 bottom Hand-painted Surfaces 3 Cologne/New York
“4” Cardboard, paint, and table
Plastic, paint, and printed text As Yet Untitled 3 95 × 140 × 70 cm Box 3
237.5 × 269 × 2 cm Glass, glue, silicone, tape, metal Collection Lab’Bel 2018
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ brackets painted in white p. 104 middle Silkscreen on wood, acrylic paint,
Cologne/New York 21 × 80 × 22 cm / inkjet print on paper and plexiglas
p. 134 21 × 81 × 20.5 cm Hand-painted Surfaces 4 32 × 39 × 32 cm
Collection Laurent Fiévet, Paris Cardboard, paint, and table Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
“5” p. 104 top and middle 87.5 × 140 × 70 cm Cologne/New York
Plastic, paint, and printed text Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
235 × 198 × 2 cm As Yet Untitled 4 Cologne/New York Box
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Glass, glue, silicone, and metal p. 97 top 2018
Cologne/New York brackets Silkscreen on wood, acrylic paint,
p. 137 bottom 61 × 45 × 18 cm lacquer, inkjet print on paper and
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ plexiglas
“6” Cologne/New York 32 × 39 × 32 cm
Plastic, paint, and printed text Mackert Collection
254 × 198 × 2 cm As Yet Untitled 5 p. 80 bottom
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Glass, glue, silicone, tape, metal
Cologne/New York brackets painted in white Exit / Portal
p. 137 bottom 2 parts: 19 × 60 × 20 cm each 2018
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Wood and metal
“7” Cologne/New York 179 × 66 × 23 cm
Plastic, paint, and printed text Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
241.5 × 199.5 cm / 228.5 × 197 cm As Yet Untitled 7 Cologne/New York
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Glass, glue, silicone, Post-it, p. 91
Cologne/New York marker, and metal brackets
p. 132 45 × 60 × 20.5 cm Hey Geometry!
Collection of Maxwell Graham, 2018
“8” New York Cardboard, acrylic paint, metal,
Plastic, paint, and printed text p. 103 top inkjet print on paper, inkjet print
198 × 220 × 2 cm on film
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ As Yet Untitled 9 100 × 99 × 8 cm / 21 × 11 cm /
Cologne/New York Glass, glue, and metal brackets 13.5 × 7 cm
pp. 134–135 16 × 61.5 × 16 cm / 21 × 81 × 21 cm Mackert Collection
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ pp. 78–79
Self-Production Cologne/New York
2017/2019 Naked Lunch Box
Wooden board, paint, glass, light, Depression 1 2018
aluminum, rope, wheels, and Glass, glue, and paint Silkscreen on wood, acrylic paint,
collages 25 × 51.5 × 26 cm lacquer, inkjet print on paper and
244 × 370 × 200 cm Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ plexiglas
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Cologne/New York 37 × 44 × 44 cm
Cologne/New York Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
pp. 152–153 Depression 2 Cologne/New York
Glass, glue, and paint p. 81 bottom
25 × 51.5 × 26 cm
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ No Mouth No Tongue Box
Cologne/New York 2018
p. 105 Wood, acrylic paint, inkjet print
on paper and plexiglas
32 × 39 × 32 cm
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/
New York
pp. 82 top, 83 top left

Referring to: The Master- OTHER WORKS REPRODUCED Homosexual Rights Around Anthologie de l’amour sublime
Slave Dialectic! IN THE CATALOGUE the World, 2000 (Anthology of Sublime Love), 2003
2018 A4 handouts (16 pp.) 81 computer collages
Plexiglas and glue 1 ESSAYS pp. 17 bottom, 35 29.7 × 21 cm each
160 × 152 × 31 cm Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Four Pieces after Sol LeWitt, Institutions / Authority, 2000 Cologne/New York
Cologne/New York 1998 Handouts (2 pp., stapled), shoe pp. 36–37
p. 89 Styrofoam, tape, Dimensions variable
milk carton (23 × 23 × 7 cm), p. 22 top left Preparation–scans, original
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2 cubes (108.5 × 104 cm each), titles, prints, 2003
(John Ashbery Box) and 1 cube (93 × 104 × 96 cm) Jugendliche ohne Lehrstelle CDs, inkjet print and pencil
2018 p. 25 (Youth Without Education), 2000 on papers in vitrine
Silkscreen on wood, acrylic paint, Inkjet prints on A4 paper, 93 × 157 × 56.5 cm
inkjet print on paper and plexiglas Homosexuelle Katze glued together, tape p. 33 bottom
32 × 39 × 32 cm (Gay Cat), 1998 147 × 173 cm
Collection Daniel Buchholz & Inkjet prints on A4 paper p. 18 bottom Rest, 2003
Christopher Müller, Cologne on cardboard Inkjet print on papers
pp. 81 top, 83 top right 2 parts (100 × 140 cm total) Kellogg’s, 1999 and plastic folders in vitrine
p. 22 middle left Letraset, pencil, and acrylic 93 × 127 × 67 cm
The Discipline and Punish Box! on cardboard p. 33 bottom right
2018 Zwischenstufe 5 (nach Magnus 29.7 × 20.8 cm
Cardboard and print on film Hirschfeld) p. 23 top right The State vs. Aaron McKinney,
31 × 41 × 51 cm (In-Betweens 5 [after Magnus 2003
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Hirschfeld]), 1999 Reconstructions of Nests from Inkjet prints and pencil on cardboard
Cologne/New York Wood, paint, and milk carton Same-Sex Courtships, 2000 14 parts (68 × 96 cm each)
p. 80 top Dimensions variable Eggs placed in various locations p. 24 top
pp. 17 top, 20 top Dimensions variable
Rechte Ecken p. 22 bottom left Information on Some Gay-Lesbian
(Straight Corners) Adaptation Study I, 2000 Artists (or Artists Relevant to
2019 Prints on A4 paper glued Social Organization and Homo-Social Culture) in the
4 plaster castings of the corners together, tape Frequency of Homosexual Format of the Daily Mail, October
of the room made in situ 125 × 175 cm Behavior Among Giraffes, 2000 17, 2004, 2006
Dimensions variable p. 23 top left Collage on milk carton Double-sided inkjet prints on A3+
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ 22 × 7.5 × 7.5 cm newsprint, marker
Cologne/New York Armutsgrenze / Versperrter p. 20 bottom 10 parts (48.3 × 32.9 cm each)
p. 16 right Durchgang Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
(Poverty Line / Blocked Vito Acconci is straight, 2000 Cologne/New York
Entrance), 2000 Inkjet prints on A4 paper, pp. 40 bottom, 188 top,
Plywood, paint, newspaper, nails, glued together, tape 189 bottom left
and milk carton 202 × 262 cm
505 × 120 cm pp. 22–23 bottom Cast 5, 2011
p. 19 top Polyurethane cast
Vito Acconci teaching about 631 cm (Ø 0.5 / 1.2 cm)
(Aufklärung) gender / What does this p. 16 left
([Education]), 2000 represent?, 2000
Wooden bars, masonite boards, Inkjet prints on A4 paper, glued Interior, 2016
nails, newspaper, white paint, together, tape, acrylic paint Aluminum and screws
Letraset, inkjet prints on yellow 176.5 × 205 cm 375 × 6 × 3 cm
A4 paper, staples, cord pp. 22–23 bottom Galleria Franco Noero
340 × 115 cm p. 31
p. 19 top Zentralheizung
(Central Heating), 2000 Untitled, 2017
AUFKLÄRUNG: § 209 ÖstGB: Silver paint on radiator Wood, acrylic, and screws
Strafrechtliche Normen gegen Dimensions variable 56 × 167 × 3.5 cm
Homosexualität in Österreich p. 18 bottom Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
(AUFKLÄRUNG: § 209 ÖstGB: Cologne/New York
Criminal Law Standards Against Collage/invitation card for the p. 24 bottom
Homosexuality in Austria), 2000 exhibition Lack of Information,
Inkjet print on A4 paper Studiogalerie, Kunstverein Rote Ecke
29.7 × 21 cm Braunschweig (Germany), 2001 (Red Corner), 2018
p. 22 top right p. 29 Cardboard, acrylic, capalex
primer, and lacquer
Autorität / Schuh 1935 1922, 2003 100 × 100 × 7.7 cm
(Authority / Shoe), 2000 10 inkjet prints, pencil Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
Size 41 shoe and paper in vitrine Cologne/New York
p. 35 93 × 131.5 × 67 cm p. 31
pp. 32–33
Eingang / Ausgang Milk, 2019
(Entrance / Exit), 2000 A l’intérieur de la vue. Epoxy
Wooden bars and plywood 10 poèmes visibles 23 × 7 × 7.5 cm
345 × 170 cm (In the Interior of the View: Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
p. 19 10 Visible Poems), 2003 Cologne/New York
10 inkjet prints and pencil p. 53
History is straight, 2000 on papers in vitrine
Inkjet prints, glued together, tape 93 × 146.5 × 66.5 cm Untitled, 2019
101 × 101 cm p. 33 bottom Glass, glue, metal brackets
pp. 22–23 bottom 36.5 × 60 × 20 cm
Cabinet
p. 47

2 WORKS Hysterical Men 1, 2, 2013 Poster for the exhibition After Hey Panopticon!
Inkjet prints on newspaper and Dhalgren, Galleria Franco Noero, Hey Asymmetry!, 2018
Invitation card for the exhibition mounted on canvas, acrylic paint, Turin, 2016 Silkscreen on MDF, acrylic paint
Henrik Olesen, MD 72, Berlin, and nails Galleria Franco Noero 140 × 110 cm
2007 1 (215 × 1000 cm), p. 147 Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ 2 (204 × 585 cm) Cologne/New York
Cologne/New York Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Yes/No Future, 2016 p. 90 bottom
p. 188 top right Cologne/New York Offset print on T-shirts,
pp. 204–206, 211 various sizes Hey Vollmilch!
2.87 × 3.98, 2008 Deborah Schamoni (Hey Whole Milk!), 2018
Tape Hysterical Men, T-Shirts, 2013 p. 158 bottom Silkscreen on MDF, acrylic paint
287 × 398 cm White cotton, silkscreen, 139 × 110 cm
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ and cardboard boxes Bent frame, 2017 Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
Cologne/New York Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Inkjet prints on Cologne/New York
p. 122 bottom Cologne/New York transparent film, metal p. 90 top right
p. 208 183 × 7.5 × 36.5 cm
Invitation card for the exhibition Cabinet Untitled, 2018
How Do I Make Myself a Body?, Invitation card for the exhibition p. 110 Silkscreen on wood, acrylic paint,
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2008 Hysterical Men, Galerie Buchholz, lacquer, inkjet print on paper,
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Berlin, 2013 Double frame I, 2017 plexiglas, epoxy
Cologne/New York Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Metal, transparent film, ink 28 × 24 × 29 cm
p. 123 bottom Cologne/New York 300 × 300 × 7 cm Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
p. 209 top Cabinet Cologne/New York
Papa-Mama-Ich pp. 108–109 pp. 82 bottom, 83 bottom
(Dad-Mom-Me), 2009 Self Sex, 2013
Inkjet prints and marker on Inkjet prints on newspaper and Pink view / Horizontal frame,
newsprint, 3 tables, glass, and 32 mounted on canvas, acrylic paint, 2017
collages (42 × 29.7 cm each) and nails Plastic, paint, metal,
pp. 196–197 203 × 152 cm transparent film, and ink
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Dimensions variable
Studio Voltaire Presents Cologne/New York Cabinet
Mr. Knife and Mrs. Fork, 2009 p. 204 top pp. 108–109, 111 bottom, 112
Cardboard box, cutlery, and jar
32 × 39 × 29.5 cm After Dhalgren I–IV, 2015 Red angle, 2017
p. 201 Inkjet prints on matte photo Paint on metal
paper, acrylic and oil on masonite 143 × 157 × 7 cm
A.T., 2012 I (212 × 168 cm) Cabinet
Inkjet print on paper II (210 × 195 cm) p. 113
20 parts (48.3 × 33 cm each) III (210 × 270 cm)
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ IV (208 × 194 cm) Single frame, 2017
Cologne/New York Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Metal, transparent film, ink
P. 20 bottom Cologne/New York 300 × 300 × 7 cm
pp. 142–145 Cabinet
Goat 1, 2, 3, 2012 p. 111 top
C-print and acrylic on board Addressing The Men
122 × 85.5 cm each of Darkness, 2016 Untitled, 2017
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ 11 inkjet prints on photo paper C-print
Cologne/New York (30 × 45 cm each), 29.8 × 42 cm
p. 180 top 2 horizontal aluminum bars Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
(403 × 3 × 6 cm / 372 × 3 × 6 cm), Cologne/New York
Monogram / Natures Morte 1 vertical aluminum bar p. 146
(Monogram / Still Lifes), 2012 (283 × 3 × 6 cm), screws
C-print, acrylic paint Galleria Franco Noero Untitled, 2017
on cardboard pp. 154–155 C-print, tape, and collage
4 parts (104 × 83 cm each) on paper
dépendance, Brussels Invitation card for the exhibition 29.5 × 42 cm
p. 181 Henrik Olesen, Galerie Buchholz, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
New York, 2016 Cologne/New York
A dentist told my father that Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ p. 148 bottom
he would soon lose all his teeth Cologne/New York
because of the violence of his p. 141 Discipline and Punish, 2018
bite, 2013 Silkscreen on MDF, acrylic paint
Inkjet prints on newspaper Invitation card for the exhibition 140 × 110 cm
glued on masonite, acrylic paint, Conversation in a Yes/No Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
and nails Landscape, Deborah Schamoni, Cologne/New York
83 × 108 cm Munich, 2016 p. 90 top left
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Deborah Schamoni
Cologne/New York p. 160 top left Hey Panopticon 1, 2, 3, 5, 2018
p. 181 Acrylic paint on MDF,
Un captif amoureux plexiglas, and inkjet print
Der Spaziergang (A Captive Lover), 2016 on transparent foil
(The Walk), 2013 Offset print on T-shirts, 1 (69 × 50.5 × 7.5 cm),
Plasterboard, aluminum, spackle, various sizes 2 (69 × 57 × 6.5 cm),
and white paint Deborah Schamoni 3 (59 × 51 × 6.5 cm),
220 × 700 cm p. 162 5 (69 × 51 × 11.5 cm)
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/
Cologne/New York Cologne/New York
p. 207 pp. 86–87

COLOFÓN

MINISTRY OF CULTURE AND SPORTS ROYAL BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEO
NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
Minister
José Guirao Cabrera Honorary Presidency
Their Majesties the King and Queen of Spain
President
Ricardo Martí Fluxá
Vice President
Óscar Fanjul Martín
Ex Officio Trustees
Javier García Fernández
(Undersecretary for Culture and Sports)
María José Gualda Romero
(State Secretary for Budgets and Expenditure)
Román Fernández-Baca Casares
(Director General of Fine Arts)
Manuel Borja-Villel
(Museum Director)
Cristina Juarranz de la Fuente
(Museum Deputy Director of Management)
Vicente Jesús Domínguez García
(Regional Vice-Minister for Culture of Asturias)
Francisco Javier Fernández Mañanes
(Regional Minister of Education, Culture and Sports
of Cantabria)
Patricia del Pozo Fernández
(Minister of Culture and Historical Heritage of the Regional
Government of Andalucía)
Pilar Lladó Arburúa
(President of Fundación Amigos del Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía)
Elective Trustees
Miguel Ángel Cortés Martín
Montserrat Aguer Teixidor
Marcelo Mattos Araújo
Santiago de Torres Sanahuja
Pedro Argüelles Salaverría
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Carlos Lamela de Vargas
Alberto Cortina Koplowitz
Estrella de Diego Otero
Ana María Pilar Vallés Blasco
José María Álvarez-Pallete
(Telefónica, SA)
Ana Patricia Botín Sanz de Sautuola O’Shea
(Banco Santander)
Ignacio Garralda Ruiz de Velasco
(Fundación Mutua Madrileña)
Antonio Huertas Mejías
(Mapfre, SA)
Pablo Isla Álvarez de Tejera
(Inditex)
Honorary Trustees
Guillermo de la Dehesa
Pilar Citoler Carilla
Claude Ruiz Picasso
Carlos Solchaga Catalán

MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO
DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
Director Public Activities

Manuel Borja-Villel
Director of Public Activities and the Study Centre
Deputy Director and Chief Curator Ana Longoni
João Fernandes
Head of Cultural Activities and Audiovisual Program
Deputy Director of Management Chema González
Cristina Juarranz de la Fuente
Head of Education
Assistant to the Director María Acaso
Carmen Castañón
Deputy Directorate Management

Director’s Office
Deputy Managing Director
Head of Office Ángel Esteve
Nicola Wohlfarth
Technical Advisor
Head of Press Mercedes Roldán
Concha Iglesias
Head of Assistance Management
Head of Protocol Guadalupe Herranz Escudero
Sonsoles Vallina
Head of the Economic Department
Luis Ramón Enseñat Calderón
Exhibitions
Head of Strategic Development and Business
Head of Exhibitions Rosa Rodrigo
Teresa Velázquez
Head of the Human Resources Department
General Coordinator of Exhibitions María Esperanza Zarauz Palma
Belén Díaz de Rábago
Head of the Department of Architecture,
Facilities and General Services
Collections Javier Pinto
Head of Collections Head of the Security Department

Rosario Peiró Luis Barrios
Head of Restoration Head of IT Department

Jorge García Sara Horganero
Head of the Office of the Registrar

Carmen Cabrera
Editorial Activities
Head of Editorial Activities

Alicia Pinteño

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
This book is published to coincide with the Catalogue published by the

exhibition Henrik Olesen, organized and held Publications Department of MNCARS
at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofía from June 25 to October 21, 2019. Head of Publications
Alicia Pinteño
Curator
Helena Tatay Editorial Coordination
Mercedes Pineda
Head of Exhibitions
Teresa Velázquez Translations
Spanish to English:
Exhibition Coordinator Jaime Blasco
Soledad Liaño
Copyeditor
Exhibitions Manager Jonathan Fox
Natalia Guaza
Graphic Design
Registrar Alex Gifreu
Clara Berástegui
Production Management
Conservation Julio López
Pilar Gracia Serrano – Conservator in charge
Paloma Calopa Plates
Pilar García Fernández Museoteca
Planimetry Printing
Pez Arquitectos Willing Press
Binding
Ramos
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS © This edition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2019
Essays, BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Johnna Arnold, pp. 153, 172–173
Christian Augustin, p. 18
Mark Blower, pp. 108–110, 111 top, 111 middle right,
111 bottom, 112–115 © reprints, their authors
© Henrik Olesen, 2019
A. Burger, p. 189 bottom right
EPW Studio, p. 189 top
We are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others.
Ulrich Gebert, pp. 158-163
While all reasonable efforts have been made to state copyright holders
Florian Kleinefenn, pp. 96, 97 top, 98, 100–103, 105
of material used in this work, any oversight will be corrected in future
Joerg Lohse, pp. 130–138 editions, provided the Publishers have been duly informed.
Henrik Olesen, pp. 16 left, 17, 19, 20, 22 top, 22 bottom,
23 top, 24 top, 31, 78–79, 90 bottom left, 94–95, ISBN: 978-84-8026-597-3
97 bottom, 99, 104, 111 middle left, 149–152, 196–197, 201 NIPO: 828-19-014-1
Sebastiano Pellion di Persano, pp. 50, 154–155 L.D.: M-17883-2019
Tom Powel Imaging, pp. 56–57
Lothar Schnepf, pp. 194–195 General catalogue of official publications
Uwe Walter, pp. 40 middle, 42–43 http://publicacionesoficiales.boe.es
Jens Ziehe, pp. 14, 16 right, 22 middle, 22-23 bottom,
25, 32–33 top, 33 bottom, 35, 80–89, cover and back-cover Distribution and Retail
https://sede.educacion.gob.es/publiventa/
This book has been printed on:

Arctic Volume White, 150 g/m2
Arctic Volume White, 300 g/m2
224 pages, color illustrations

220 × 270 mm

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

wish to thank firstly and specially to Henrik Olesen
and Helena Tatay for their close collaboration and
support along the preparation of this exhibition.
Thanks are also due to the following people and

institutions who have helped this project to materialize:
Gerry Bibby
Rory Biddulph
Caroline Bourgeois
Daniel Buchholz
Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York
Bobby and Eleanor Cayre
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Nikola Dietrich
Pierpaolo Falone
Galleria Franco Noero, Turin
Dr. Alfred Gillio and Paul Berstein
Maxwell Graham
Friederike Gratz
John Kelsey
Collection Laurent Fiévet, Paris
Collection Lab’Bel, Paris
Scott Lorinsky
Vera Lutz
Mackert Collection
Carlos Mayor
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Ariane Müller
Christopher Müller
Museo Ludwig
Franco Noero
Colección Pinault
Deborah Schamoni
Alexander Schröder
Reena Spaulings Fine Art
Marco Rovacchi
Timo Seber
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhaguen
Norman and Norah Stone
Wolfgang Tillmans
Mark von Schlegell
Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner
Scott Cameron Weaver
and those who wish to remain anonymous.
Finally, we thank the authors of the texts in

this catalogue for their contribution to the project:
Lars Bang Larsen

Dodie Bellamy
Paul B. Preciado

HENRIK OLESEN
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HENRIK OLESEN

coverHOdefinitiva.indd 2 10/6/19 10:35

HOtripaENGdef.indd 1 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 2 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 3 6/6/19 11:23

Aware that the struggle for discursive power is linked

In his works made since the mid-2000s, Olesen strives

HOtripaENGdef.indd 5 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 6 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 7 6/6/19 11:23

38 We Do Not Dispose of Reliable Criteria… Not Yet

58 A Visit to H.E.N.R.I.K. O.L.E.S.E.N.’s Hall of Fantasy

62 The Violence of the Image

HOtripaENGdef.indd 8 6/6/19 11:23

116 HOW DO I MAKE MYSELF A BODY?

128 ST. GEORGE & THE DRAGON

156 CONVERSATION IN A YES/NO LANDSCAPE

182 SOME FAGGY GESTURES

190 MR. KNIFE AND MRS. FORK

202 HYSTERICAL MEN

HOtripaENGdef.indd 9 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 10 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 11 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 12 6/6/19 11:23

HOtripaENGdef.indd 13 6/6/19 11:23

of the conservative tabloid the Daily Mail as though

Artistic discourse has been one of Henrik Olesen’s

INSIDE THE SIGHT6

In 2003, Olesen made the series of collages Anthologie

5 Henrik Olesen, conversation with the author, December 2018.

7 A publication of the same title was issued by the Sprengel

HOtripaENGdef.indd 14 6/6/19 11:24

8 Nicholas Cullinan, “1000 Words: Henrik Olesen,” Artforum 48,

HOtripaENGdef.indd 15 6/6/19 11:24

Rechte Ecke (Straight Corner), 2003 (detail)

Zwischenstufe 5 (nach Magnus Hirschfeld)

Homosexual Rights Around the World, 2000 >

HOtripaENGdef.indd 16 6/6/19 11:24

in this work—outlawed homosexual relations between

a dress is not trousers

In later works, Olesen revisited this period at the

For years, in response to the invisibility of gay culture

The project pays homage to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne

10 Henrik Olesen: Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists

HOtripaENGdef.indd 18 6/6/19 11:24

construct a positive, plural image of gay cultural history.

As the title indicates, in this case Olesen’s research

11 Henrik Olesen, “Future Bodies and Gendered Prophecy:

HOtripaENGdef.indd 20 6/6/19 11:24

ANGLE In both cases the works were linked to ritual, magic,

HOtripaENGdef.indd 21 6/6/19 11:24

HOtripaENGdef.indd 22 6/6/19 11:24

AUFKLÄRUNG: § 209 ÖstGB: Strafrechtliche Normen

Homosexuelle Katze (Gay Cat), 1998

Reconstructions of Nests from Same-Sex Courtships, 2000

Adaptation Study I, 2000

Vito Acconci teaching about gender /

HOtripaENGdef.indd 23 6/6/19 11:24

and other Henrik Olesen exhibition catalogues. “Better

Like Artaud, like the Dadaists, Olesen seeks to dismantle