History: BECOMING GOD

Self portraits,

17 years old.

I identify as exclusively homosexual, but the notions of eroticism i will explore will include females. The balance between masculinity and femininity is something that I have always flirted with. I was a full-time transvestite between the ages of 16 and 18 and have recently been experimenting with cross dressing again.

I recently went to a friend’s exhibition opening in Bethnal Green dressed as Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. This was the first occasion I’d had in a long time to dress glamorously and actually go out to something that wasn’t a fancy dress party, and I felt euphoric. It was the most beautiful that I’d felt in a long time. I started cross dressing as an act against the notion that “Boys can’t wear dresses”, not because I felt that I was a woman, or even had any desire to be. When I do it now, I feel it’s about channelling the powers of both male and female, I want to be strong, glamorous, beautiful and unyielding. I enjoy the element of danger or exhilaration I get from walking the streets in heels and a pencil skirt. I’ve been challenged on the street before for my general appearance and know that I can take whatever abuse is given, or fight back if needed. I feel secure in myself and confident enough to possibly endanger my body.

As an adolescent, being a transvestite opened many doors to me. Strange bars and nightclubs across Europe opened their doors to me. The clothes I wore were ridiculous; silk night dresses with high heels three sizes too small, so much mascara I could barely keep my eyes open. Middle aged men fell at my feet, offering up money and alcohol as though I was a deity. I felt that I knew what it was to have Power. I had power over these men because my body was unlike theirs. I was young, I felt I was free, I felt I was beautiful, and these twisted, gnarled old creatures wanted to drink in my youthful sexuality and feel rejuvenated, reborn. I was the new messiah, I became God.

I stopped cross dressing when I realised that I didn’t like the way I looked. I wanted to be beautiful, alluringly androgynous, mysterious, but as I grew older I became more and more male looking. Now, I embrace looking masculine whilst still dressing feminine, but then, that wasn’t part of my aesthetic agenda. I was no longer a nymph. I retained my sense of self though. I continued to go to clubs where I was worshipped. I was still a deity, I had just assumed a new form.

Intent: ESOTERIC EROTICA

It is said that experiencing orgasm is like experiencing death. La Petite Mort. During the climax of arousal, we transcend our bodies and come to know the Hereafter. I ejaculate in order to communicate with God. This is how I come to understand myself. By thrusting my convulsing body into His hands I satiate my carnal desires and further explore my own soul. I know that I am God. I know that orgasm is part of my autolatry. This is an exploration into the mystery schools of my own consciousness.

If mainstream pornography can be compared to a major religion, then what I intend to uncover are the esoteric mysteries of that orthodoxy.

The growth of the sexual being from birth until adulthood is what I intend to study. This is comparable in many ways to the growth of the Christian church. From infancy to the age of around twelve(early adolescence) our manias are a melting pot of fantasy and imagination, we worshipped many things, many different people. We could feel beyond what now know, purely because we had no ties to any sordid realities or conventions. Romance could be felt but not quantified, it wasn’t material. Love was in abundance. A parent plays the role of the Messiah, bringing an ideology to our infant hearts. The concepts of relationships and families, monogamy and dedication are introduced and begin to germinate. The message is clear; Love, untouchable, all consuming love is message, the common goal, the aspiration, and with love comes the arousing spiritual connection between people. It is erotic, but not in the sordid way we assume. It is metaphysical erotica. It is a spiritual stirring, a movement of stars.

But then comes the fascist institutions of commercial pornography to give us new direction, new meanings for love. If our infant souls exist in the realms of early religions and cosmic mysteries, then commercial pornography plays the role of the Roman Catholic Church, taking a message that was preached to us by a messiah and twisting it for its own ends. The Roman Catholic Church seized power by taking elements of what we knew and suspected and believed and contorted it all together, making it one of the most powerful institutions the world has ever known, much as commercial pornography has. It provided us with a new mania, that of sex, carnal, animal sex.  Now this in itself is not unjust, or reprehensible, but we begin to invest too much of ourselves in it. Catholics preach love, forgiveness, loyalty, all admirable qualities, but with it comes dogma, close mindedness and hatred. Commercial porn teaches us to explore our own sexual beings, it lets us know we are not alone in the world of erotic thought, and gives us access to a higher form of fantasy and arousal, but it also breeds forms of sexism, increasing senses of entitlement and dissatisfaction, and above all, it limits us. When one practices the act of masturbation to excess, one becomes less reactive to the touch of others.

To become truly enlightened of our sexual selves, we need to take the higher forms of self awareness we get from pornography and mix it with the esoteric ideologies of love and connection from our youth. We can form hybrids of dream, erotic fantasy and memory and access more than we ever dreamed possible. This way we can create newer and higher form of fantasy and can transcend ourselves and know our true Gods; ourselves.

In my generation, the pivotal role of Emperor Constantine was filled by computers and the Internet. Computers were created to allow us to have easier lives, to unite us in the way that Constantine did. The Roman Catholic Church used Constantine to spread their own dogma throughout the known world, he was their medium. The internet spread pornography everywhere and made it one of the most accessible forms of visual culture ever known.

Through images I will fuse together fantasy, memory and performance and compile a dossier of esoteric erotica. By this, I mean images that stir some arousing chord within me, despite perhaps not being overly sensual to others.

INVASION

Male fingers invade 

My dreams. Strong ancient heroes 

Invade my body.

Manifesto: I AM THE COSMOS

Blinding ignorance does mislead us! O wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Open your eyes and see the world around you. See beyond the mundane, the everyday, the boring, see beyond the limitations of this mortal coil. See the world with full perception. Open your eyes to that which we don’t know, feel the oceans of imagination that flow around us. Open your eyes to the personal realities in which we all exist.

This so-called TRUTH we share is abhorrent. Vérité is my enemy. I am sick of the lifeless world that we live in, which seems to be the only thing everyone else seems to be so absorbed in. There is so much more to this world than what we think we know. There are no limitations. I am a divinity. I am a deity. This world belongs to me. I am the creator. Keep your hideous buildings, your dull skies, your decaying trees, your soulless inhabitants for I do not want you. I will not be restricted by your ideas, your perceptions, your realisations, your stunted ideas of beauty, of right and wrong.

There is no such thing as good or evil, light or dark, there is only beauty, and those to blind to see it.

I live in a scented paradise, a rolling tide of silk flowers and rosewater. The sun shines when I command it. My bed is a cushioned womb, dripping with blood and moonlight. I sit on a throne with a garland of flowers around my head and people come to pay me homage. I enjoy my existence because I have altered it, because I have taken control of it, because I can see the world around me for what it is and how it should be.

I am tired of people telling me about the limitations of photography. The only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself. If you confine yourself to the miserable little fraction of the world that we all have in common, then what can you expect? People tell me that it is a photographer’s role to explore what we all see, to take a second look, to present to the world what we already know with an extra layer of understanding or new perspective. I disagree. I violently disagree. Why on earth would I waste my time exploring objects and experiences that we all understand, why explore something that others feel when I have an entire cosmos of self left untouched?

I spit in the face of reality. I want to dream forever. I will survive this holocaust. I will not be swept along in this desert of nothingness so evident to me from the recent exhibitions I have seen. Is this the death of imagination? Why does fine art photography have to mean lifeless abstracts? What is this obsession with process and medium? I am a creator. The tools I use are incidental. I am a camera. I am a painter. I am a designer. I am a director. I am an auteur. I am an artist. I am a poet. Above all else, I am a poet. Every night I tell myself I am the cosmos. I will never stop. I will spray my blood over the walls of the Louvre. I will cut my fingers off in the New York Metropolitan. I will vomit in the Guggenheim gallery.

You ask for my carefully processed C-type prints, mounted on metal with an invisible adhesive with an accompanying text panel displaying my name, explanation optional. Instead I give you my heart, my body, my blood. Photography is not sterile. I feel as though the rest of the world has been castrated, neutered, spayed. I alone am susceptible to the transcendental orgasms of beauty and revulsion, I alone can perceive every aspect of a world I have created. I will mix my blood with the chemicals and the soil and I shall paint something incredible.

I will never die; it’s only the world that will end.

I am a narcissist. I am a Brutalist. I am a romanticist. I am a goddess worshiper. I am a Satanist. I am a classicist. I am a catholic. I am a pharaoh. I am a God King. I am a beauty seeker. I am a terrorist. I am everything I’ve dreamed of.  I am Christ. I am the Madonna. I am La Divina. I am the Sun.

I AM AN ARTIST.