Notes
1 Origionally comissioned for the Museum of Sex Objects, exhibited as a printed booklet along with a collection of witch bottle sculptures and a hand drawn poetic wall-hanging.
2 Printed books are now stocked by Treadwell’s Books in Bloomsbury, London.
1 Origionally comissioned for the Museum of Sex Objects, exhibited as a printed booklet along with a collection of witch bottle sculptures and a hand drawn poetic wall-hanging.
2 Printed books are now stocked by Treadwell’s Books in Bloomsbury, London.
Poem: Out She Spills
with accompanying essay:
Witched & Whored
The historic witch-trials scattered and fragmented the latent energies of protest, forever marking ‘witches’ as a political category, as bad objects. But how can we mobilise today? Well, if the witch-hunters are back, then why not the witches? Magic has always been a tool of the oppressed and in the present political climate a new wave of interest in these practices has surged amongst marginalised groups. When barred from the mainstream social order of patriarchal institutions, the oppressed must turn to their own rituals, protests, and practices. Mona Chollet argues, as exemplified in the 1960s radical feminist group named W.I.T.C.H. (the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), “the witch embodies woman free of all domination, all limitation. She is an ideal to aim for; she shows us the way.”
How do we think about sex-work, witchcraft, and sex itself in an affirming, politically galvanizing way, and how do we approach sexual-magical histories that have been erased?
The art piece which this booklet accompanies – ‘Out She Spills’ – communes directly with the recent ‘poetic turn’ in history as a new way to re-invigorate unheard voices. This turn is one driven by an ‘ethics of un-forgetting’, of telling the unofficial story. By drawing attention to the narrativisation of all history – or as Michel- Rolph Trouillot has put it, displaying that ‘the naming of the ‘fact’ is itself a narrative of power disguised as innocence’ – the art piece uses a fragmentary poetic-matrix to express the trauma and impact of what the ‘witch’ and ‘whore’ mean, both in their personal and political senses.
Instead of writing in a tidy, academically historical way, the piece mobilises the mystery of encountering objects such as the flickering muslin material on which the poem is written or the hard-to-see fragmentary traces within the fogged glass of the display’s ‘Witch Bottle’. I encourage viewers to think about these objects in the context of magic, specifically ‘sympathetic magic’ and Frazer, Mauss and Tylor’s idea of ‘contagion’, a theory summarised by the memorandum: ‘once in contact, always in contact’. Such a theory helps us think about the atemporal attachment and significance we place onto antique and inherited objects. In this way, the objects encapsulate the project’s wider mission of employing ‘creative’ approaches to history, something outlined by Hélène Cixcous’ theory of écriture féminine. She states that, given women’s subject position is marginal to Western phallocentric culture, ‘woman’ is decentred from that same rational, representational phallocentric Symbolic order and is therefore freer to move and create differently. This embracing of inexplicability rather than rationality may then suggest why magic might be so appealing and empowering to women in particular, as its occult workings and inexplicability define its very power. The idea of women as “mystery” is reappropriated here into an empowerment, free from the shackles of phallocentric thought. The piece therefore tries to access a mode of writing that might reaffirm a subject’s understanding of the world through an engagement with her own otherness. Instead of centring on a flat, two-dimensional written piece, the exhibition utilises three-dimensional objects which will necessarily always conceal a part of themselves from the viewer in a defiant refusal of explicability.
Likewise, if we use such a lens to think about sex (or indeed magic) and try to understand it as something centring on dissolving and reforming, on making ourselves edgeless against the skin of the world, then sex itself has the capacity to model the vast, entangled, strange and unknowable magic of the world. Drawing upon what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the ‘perpetual excitement’ of queerness as a relational and strange ‘means of asserting while giving the slip’, the piece asks the viewer to rethink the label ‘witch’ itself as a radical refusal of terms. The witch is always multi-dimensional, monstrous, sexy, ugly , both bringer and destroyer of life, maiden, goddess, crone – she always retains a sense of the fugitive, always encapsulates multitudes.
She is all that is un-human about the human experience.
The full pdf is availabe here.