Lie & Indite

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Apr 11

V.

It’s funny looking through these photos every week or two and putting together a post.

I know that, in the beginning, I wrote that I’m not crazy about blogs in general, and that I didn’t want our writing to get in the way of the images, but just seeing the photos for the 10th, 11th, 12th time makes me want to start writing.

(Photo by Balthazar)

And in that way, I think about how reading makes me want to write, or going to a reading will (sometimes) get my mind running on a different track. Even going to a gallery, or the museum, or out for a walk can be the determinant for whether I’m going to write or not on any particular day. What I don’t often do is read my own work, then start on something new. Lie & Indite, however, does the interesting task of allowing me a removal in approach to my own writing, which itself has been re-imagined for this new form.

(Photo by Balthazar)

Then of course there’s Katelan. Seems like every time we get together, I walk away knowing exactly where I am. It’s one of those things that I’m normally too caught-up in the movement of my life to notice, and something you can’t know for sure without a willingness to manipulate perspective, and to allow your perspective to be manipulated.

M.C.L., Apr. 2011

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Apr 05

Ink

Do you know how long it takes to wash marker from your body?

What if it’s permanent marker?

I can do better than tell you. I can show you.

I took these two after I got home from the shoot. The ink had been on me for less than two hours.

I liked the way the writing faded up my arm, like a ghost trail. I wanted to document the process afterward, how the ink is scrubbed off, how some of it sticks, how sometimes I have traces of poetry on me for days.

It took me three days to get the ink off my body. Part of me liked being still covered but the other part knew I had another shoot in a few days and the remnants would not be appreciated. We can’t be living sculptures all the time.

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Mar 28

IV.

This week,

I’ll talk about skin.

And poems, of course.

One thing that concerned me a lot at the beginning of this project (other than bug bites), was how I was going to format the poems on Katelan’s body. On the page, my poems move the way that I see them being spoken, or how I see them working spatially in my mind, adjusted for a two-dimensional medium. One of those things that seems inherent in poetry is the ability to make quick, clean jumps from idea to idea, and line breaks go a long way in facilitating those jumps. I didn’t want to give up that aspect of the poems.

So I worried a lot about how I would format everything. If you haven’t looked down (or around you) recently, you might not have noticed that bodies aren’t exactly ‘sided.’ We have a lot of curves, and you sort of realize that there’s only one side to skin—the outside—that one can use to mark on. Front, back, right and left are all just gradations of distance from each other, not at hard angles. The concept of a margin is relatively useless then, on a plane with no beginning and no end.

Because of this, I decided let the natural shape of her body inform the shape and flow of the poem, allowing more the more prominent details of anatomy (shoulders, breasts, and limbs) to stay relatively text-free, in an effort to both call attention to and undermine their prominence. As I began writing, it just came naturally. I’d stop every few lines, stand back to make sure Iwas writing symmetrically, and go back to work. The whole time it felt like a spell. Like committing this thing into the hands of something else, something much less definable (and manageable) than a piece of paper. Like Katelan was doing something to my poem that I wasn’t aware of, or that by writing it on her skin, I was tying it to some unknown, corporeal design—like she might of planned it all along.

(Photos by Balthazar)

One of the most pleasurable aspects of this decision was seeing my work in a completely different context—one that confirmed the idea of a piece of writing as a malleable object both one with and divorced from its meaning, and capable of change. I like that idea a lot.

M.C.L., March 2011

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Katelan V. Foisy balthazar

Mar 22

Process

For a while I was a naked model. I haven’t done so much lately. The process of taking off my clothes and posing has become almost second nature. Nudity doesn’t phase me. The idea of someone creating art on my body or a photographer capturing a moment, even creating one, now that’s exciting. I’m a visual creature, I live for the image, the art. It’s why I allowed Mike to write on me. It’s why I invited Balthazar and Sonia to photograph it. I just wanted to create something beautiful using different mediums.

I’m a painter. I know how to put down paint, mix colors, and follow the form. I’ve always been a fan of mixed media. Secretly I’ve always wanted to be a photographer. But as an artist I experiment. I learn. This project has been about learning, it’s been about patience.

As I lay down on that mattress and let him work, my mind wandered. I thought about things I had to do. I joked with Sonia and Balthazar. I faded away into my own world. Part of the process is letting things happen naturally, not to force them, and letting art create itself. If it’s the one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s to never force anything.

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Balthazar Katelan Foisy Lie & Indite

Mar 07

III.

Part of what Lie & Indite is about, to me, is process:

(Photos by Balthazar)

If you think it’s about tits, or getting naked, then you’ve already swallowed something that will take significantly more effort (and time) to digest. This is doing work, and if successful, it will continue to do work within you. Balthazar’s photos are incredibly sensuous, and the idea of a man straddling a woman in a cheap motel and covering her in his poetry is, well, certainly erotic. These photos have been reposted plenty of places (laughable and not) that prove that. But as I’ve said before, what I hope you walk away from this project with (if you follow it for any amount of time) is your idea of structure, interrogated.

If you know anything about interrogation (let’s hope we all do, especially those of us who cast our votes), you’ll know that it’s the one side that asks the questions, and the other that must present their answers. If my hope for Lie & Indite is to offer an interrogation of the viewer’s idea of structure (in sexuality, gender, performance, power, friendship, process, the body, poetry…), my fear is that the viewer will not see in each photo a question directed at them, but another open hole into which to pour their assumptions. This is the most dangerous and flawed way to experience, one which millions of viewers practice every time they encounter art. Confronted by a work, they ask what it should be doing (or what it is lacking), when if they asked themselves what it is doing (and how), that which happens when the viewer and the art shore up might become more readily audible.

(Photo by Balthazar)

M.C.L., March 2011

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Balthazar Katelan V. Foisy NYC Sonia The Elk Hotel poetry

Mar 01

The Elk Hotel

I get mad at New York sometimes. Mostly because it’s not the same place I moved here for. That was 1997. In my mind I was getting The Warriors NYC, and not Giuliani’s Disney circus. Mike can tell you, I’m a jaded New Yorker—I’ve seen the Chelsea Hotel lose its soul, CBGB’s close down, and Coney Island become the land of Fischer Price toys. But I’ve also been privy to amazing underground parties and met amazing groups of artists and performers that inspire me on a daily basis. Whether I want to admit it or not, this city has ingrained itself into me. And every once in a while you can find a place that has managed to stay true to its spirit. The Elk Hotel is one of those places, located in Times Square, one of the last of the hourly hotels in NYC. The paintings are screwed into the walls (literally through the paintings, which were upside down in our room), the mattresses come with one sheet, and many a couple have carved their names into the bedpost. Mike checked the mattress for bedbugs before we even put our things down. The Elk Hotel is a “nice” place for couples meeting by the hour. Clearly it was the perfect setting for Lie & Indite.

Photo from 14 to 42

We met up with Balthazar and Sonia in front of the hotel on a Saturday. I was late, Mike was later, caught in a Duane Reade buying markers and rubbing alcohol. When we went inside, the men running the front desk refused to rent one room to all four of us. We had to rent two rooms—each for two people. I still think we got swindled but that day I wasn’t in the mood to fight. We rented two rooms for two hours, using the one with the best light and most space. We set up the equipment, I stripped down and Mike started writing…

Photo by Balthazar

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Katelan Foisy balthazar katelan v. foisy

Feb 22

II.

When I first moved to New York I had no friends, no job, and very little money. I came here largely out of default—after spending my childhood moving every 1-3 years or so, sometimes every few months, I thought the most reasonable decision after school was to pick the biggest city in the country and figure out a way of getting there and setting up a new life. I was lucky in having been obsessed for some time, so I knew my way around the city pretty well and knew the neighborhoods in which I’d be able to live. I wanted to see as much art as I possibly could, to push myself as a writer, and to get a decent job, which wasn’t possible in Michigan, though I sincerely considered moving to Detroit.

The reality when I got here was that I couldn’t find a job. I was fresh out of an intensely convoluted, destructive breakup, I had no energy, I slept 16 hours a day, and I was too caught up in my own misery to write anything. At the time, I spent most of my days looking for jobs, drinking too much, and selling pirated computer programs in Union Sq., my only source of income. My growing misery manifested itself in total blackouts, hallucinations, and night terrors, and then one, 7-page poem in three parts. It was the only poem I wrote that entire year—the poem in these photographs.

(photo courtesy Balthazar)

Befriending Katelan (or rather, Katelan befriending me) was in many ways the turning point in my life and momentum after I moved to New York. For all the tight spots I found myself in, she seemed to believe that movement was possible, and when I found myself despairing my situation, she reminded me of the commitment I had made to myself when I decided to move here. She lauded the efforts I made to move forward in my life, and she championed my poems before I ever gave a proper reading in New York. We swapped manuscripts and gave each other all kinds of good (and bad) advice. On January 31, 2010, right before we were set to meet up and ring in the New Year, she sent me a message:

Do me a favor. Write down all of the things you want to let go of in 2011 on a piece of paper, and then burn it.

I’m only reasonably superstitious, but I did as she asked, and come 2011, Lie & Indite began.

M.C.L., Feb. 2011

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Katelan V. Foisy

Feb 13

Wherein Katelan Gets Mike Into Trouble

Before we had a photographer, Mike and I had some ideas of what we wanted this project to be. In order to introduce it to potential photographers, I had to come up with some images, so Mike came over to do a trial run. From those first quick snapshots, I photoshopped together some teasers. But the original teaser was this:

Apparently it caused a lot of trouble. He says I’m a troublemaker, but I never believe him. I just have a different sense of “NSFW”.

The second teaser came a few days after an odd, absinthe-infused, cliquish evening of jazz and eye patches. That night there was an intense love that ran between us. As children we form intense friendships, where one person is your best friend. You love them more than you ever loved anyone and you can’t imagine your life without them. Perhaps that’s where our mindset was that night.

This is where the story actually begins. We did an impromptu piece, a prayer of sorts, at the Jazz and Wordsmiths event at 5C in the East Village. Between sips of wine and absinthe we wrote and spoke. I knew things were shifting, our projects coming together, but I didn’t know how or why. We spoke in secret that night, codes only we knew the combinations to. I told him at a Speakeasy. “I think you’ve become my muse.” We had both been on the muse journey recently. Late into the evening we parted ways. “I have to make peace with my past.” I said. “Do you need me to come with you?” he asked. “I think I have to do this one on my own,” I said.

I walked away, waiting until he left and walked to C-Squat. I sat on a stoop nearby and drank absinthe from my flask. I tried not to cry. For years Holly and Brian had been my muses and even after their deaths, they still remained. There was a part of me that just didn’t want to let go, that thought that I could never have this kind of passionate, creative relationship again, or maybe was afraid of replacing it and them. But time changes, and people change, and sometimes you can’t hold onto that anymore. And sometimes new people come into your life, and you have no idea why you’re so connected to them or trust them but you do. And it’s ok. Mike texted me, “Are you okay?” I texted back. “Always.” I finished my flask and ventured back home.

I got home and snapped two images of what I was wearing and stripped down. I cried again. Mike had texted me to see if I had gotten home safe. I wrote him back. It was secret and cryptic. He understood. I sent him a picture the next day. It wasn’t sexy, or smart, or anything in between. Just a captured moment of someone letting go of something that was holding her back. We are not our past, we’re only what we make of ourselves in the present, and what we will make of ourselves in the future. I told Mike half-jokingly, “My next book will be all about you.”

This was the photo and underneath the teaser.

TO BE CONTINUED…

x to the o,

K

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katelan foisy balthazar lie & indite lie and indite

Feb 07

1.

As Katelan will attest, the thought of maintaining a blog on a regular basis has, until now, always intimidated me from a sense of commitment, and the sheer amount of terrible writing I’m bombarded with daily goes a long way in discouraging me from keeping a regularly written blog. By my thinking, blogging has always been the mundane territory of would-be critics and illegitimate cultural theorists, though I will admit that I know some very talented bloggers.

This then, I hope, will not be a blog, in the sense of what I’ve been up to/what I’ve been thinking about/what I think about ________.

I’m also not one much for prose (my own writing of it, not reading), and because this project, Lie & Indite, involves poetry, which is not prose, the infusion of (broken) prose narrative into our presentation of each image seems like a betrayal of what we’re trying to present. But then again, this project is not really about poetry, nor is it about poise, the body, or sex. Certainly all of those things are present here, as they are in as much of any experience, but my hope for this project is that besides releasing a series of beautiful images, Katelan and I along with the photographer can convey a sense of what the body, or what poetry, or what a photo is in a sense of physicality, both as the objects of and vehicles to creation, and as the desired objects of each other, each informing our view of the other. I would think that the general reader, if (s)he reads poetry at all, goes first to the meaning of the poem, or tries to interrogate a meaning out of it, often disregarding the poem as an object existing separately from his or her own reading. Likewise (but conversely), the voyeur goes first to the image, the physical object of the body, neglecting that the body in question exists in a meaning created of its own circumstances and desires, wholly separate (well, usually) from the desire of the voyeur.

(photo by Balthazar)

It only seems reasonable to write a post to kick things off, despite already having written too much about a project that should speak for itself. Structures change in time, by growth and decay, though the photographs presented here are, without a doubt, the substance of moments. What I hope you as a viewer walk away from Lie & Indite with is the idea of structure, your idea of it, interrogated.

M.C.L., Jan. 2011

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Balthazar Katelan Foisy

Jan 30

The Beginning

Photo by Balthazar

It was Spring when Mike and I met so I could give him my manuscript. He was the final editor on my memoir Blood and Pudding before it was sent off to the publishing house. Mike and I gathered for coffee and lazily made our way to the park. I don’t remember what was said or how it even began. All I know is at one point I asked him to join me in a project I had thought about for some time. I asked him what his penmanship looked like and he pulled out a notebook and opened to a page. He assured me it was usually neater.

A few weeks later I found myself in Scotland writing him letters from my hotel room. I was starting my book tour before it went to print. He had suggested excerpts to read, I marked them in pages with scented papers and traveled from reading to reading. Meanwhile I was forming the idea I had originally proposed, his poetry written on my body and documented by one of my photographer friends.

Words on flesh, memory, documentation, creating a moment, freezing it, capturing a fragment of a world, sensuality, art, form. Those were a few notes I scribbled onto hotel paper and taped into my suitcase as I traveled by train from Scotland to a tiny village outside of Peterborough and again into London and Oxford. Each time I packed, a new little paper was taped neatly onto the lining, and by neatly I mean it was tattered. Mike’s poems traveled too, I fell asleep to them nightly, and gave them back wrinkled.

TO BE CONTINUED