Why did you release The Necrophilic Landscape as you did, with the color removed and the title changed?
“The Necrophilic Landscape” was composed in 2010 and then shelved after being rejected for a grant. At that time the author was influenced by gothic and genre literature such as Melmoth the Wanderer and The Devil’s Elixirs, or Edogawa Ranpo’s Detective Stories. In my personal work I try to avoid nostalgia in the use of these generic references to male authors. I was asked to edit “The Necrophilic Landscape” and turn it into something suitable for release. I chose to foreground a theme that was only partially worked out in the original, that is-- that the narrative takes place in an almost entirely male world. The most obstructive editorial decision I made was to remove a central passage which contained the original’s only depiction of sex or a female character. The printed version of the book is more disjointed as a result of this decision, but it seemed to me that the only explanation for the narrative’s total mystification of sexual reproduction could be that it takes place in a fantasy world that contains only men and male children. The change in title reflects my critical distance as an editor and was meant to refer to a concept employed by a feminist theorist I like of a male drive towards necrophilia (versus female ‘biophilia’). I believe the color was removed because scans of the original artwork were not available.
What do you think of underground comics?
I’m interested in what it means for there to be a cultural or political “mainstream” against which can be defined various subcultures or genres or fringe political movements. In terms of my critical perspective on my own history, I feel like emotional investment in “subculture”, such as underground comics, or punk, or the cultural aspects of certain forms of leftist or queer or feminist political organizing, can express avoidance towards deeper questions of a person’s political role or subjectivation within a political system. By sending off social signals that I am part of and accepted in some form of fringe culture or another, I can maybe elide or make myself seems separate from aspects of my subjectivation that make me feel uncomfortable. And I might even feel emotionally justified in doing this, since it feels unfair to be implicated in a political and biological reality in which I never asked to take part. Of course then I’m diverting my energy into the symbolic and away from the material. I would like to counteract this tendency by being as “mainstream” as I can as a cultural producer but I doubt my art can change anything. My participation in political strategies of seperatism and “fringe-ism” seems separate to me from my practice as an artist.
How do you feel about the way in which you’ve been accommodated so far?
I feel like my peers have been very gracious in accommodating me as an artist despite the intensity of my specific needs and my constant undermining of my own practice. I still feel bitterness and feel excluded, although I am aware I mostly choose to exclude myself . I don’t represent myself as an artist on social media but I watch what other people are doing, and I feel special bitterness about the significance and complexity with which some of my artistic peers are able to implicate their bodies or personalities in their practice, versus my need for invisibility and my feeling that my showing my body would be pathetic. I feel conflicted in this desire to remove my body from my practice, versus my awareness that there is nothing significant or new to say at this moment that does not implicate the body and that the dematerialization of the body is a page or archetypal feint of patriarchal discourse. I often feel the desire to express myself as if I were someone else.
- Tracy Auch / Morgan Vogel / Caroline Hennessy / Caroline Bren
