Hawt K'oture: Collaborative Dressworks by MKSV & Karmenlara Seidman

On The Dresses. My side.

There’s always been a body in the canvas.  In.  In the paper.  In the wood.   In the fabric.  Making pictures is very much tattooing the skin of the world, of – the body of sexed time, the skin of you-who-is-not there, but – here.

Karmenlara Seidman is was my wife.  A privilege of marriage is witnessing the partner’s recovery of lost I’s – as well as being the suffering witnessreflection of the partner’s mounting losses against time.  One day in Trinidad I saw K at a sewing machine, making a dress, and saw instantly: she was home. She’d sewn since she was a girl.  I’d not seen her sew before.  Out of some few square meters of cloth, in a single long hot afternoon, she’d made a beautiful unique sexy dress, subtly alive with an insect’s gills and a cove reef’s tendrils.  I was amazed.

a body in the canvas    Here, a woman.  I don’t mean an image of a woman in the picture.  Most of my imagery is very masculine.  I mean a woman as the receiver of the picture itself.  The surface, the surface receiving the coal or pigment is the threshold of a being, a demand-gift threshold, & female.
The creative process – in any medium – for me is most alive – only works – when it is epistolary.  The known (real or imaginary) receiver’s being fills me with the craving to give, and it is in craving to give the work seems to find its least stuttering life, voice.
An aspect of the craving-to-give, above/beyond/behind the desire for contact is desire to be the speech of the Other.  As if in the perfect transmission of the Other’s speech, my disappearance briefly shows, and in its showing we fuse, and in the fusing – transcendence.
Imaginary. 
In this case, the pictures.
Stuttering, yes, has its place, especially under this constant hail of objects & remains, day to day.  Not catching one’s breath is how the day is sung.  Some have called stuttering true prayer.  Stuttering is separation, and the voice must announce this:  my place, my place alone, I abandoned  and I at root & roost in my place, and calling.

Craving       says: the desire to take, as well.  To have, to ingest, to sate, to incorporate.  The creative act is the impossible one:  the one that seeks union by cuts, that demands of logic an answer in meat, in color, in a gaze.  The craving to not-be, which in no way means death.  Impossible being!  Impossible!  Levinas:  Otherwise-than-being.

a receiver      Even if, only, the possibilityof one.  I am released, momentarily.  I am for-not-me, for-another.  For-the-other, as again Levinas says.  My speech will not doubleback  onto its source.  I am not made double-heavy by the solipsism of expressing ‘myself’.  That double-heaviness is a stunted disappearing, a turning to stone or salt – a freezing into the selfsame.  Earth dumb and object of witness, goad to a hungry embrace – and so, not without merit. 
Having a receiver I become receiver, and am effortlessly directed to a kind of open-heart bypass.  I’m out of my way.  I go.
Imaginary.

So, after we returned from Trinidad, K had the idea of my ‘people’, ‘creatures’, ‘faces’, ‘landscapes’ on her clothes.  I liked loved the idea.  My very masculine figures on very feminine forms.  Moving art.  Off the wall.  Dancing with the wearer’s motion through the day.  A true collaboration, much like our Tiny Volcofsky work.
The Fishboat Dress was the first piece.

Eventually, pretty soon, the Fishboat Dress sold. I was told it was bought by a beautiful blond with fine legs and a big chest to wear to a prize fight in Atlantic City.  Perfect.  I was honored, visceral-esthetically turned-on and, again – amazed.  And that’s when I realized:  there’s always been a body in the pictures:  they’ve always been for someone; here, Woman.  Again, the epistolary nature of the voice, and (my) History’s blessing, of which I speak obliquely elsewhere on this site. 
The call never goes through, and is always being made.
Its non-reception lets me know the phone’s still working.

for someone         This could also be expressed as:  the pictures have always been at someone; here, Woman.  The created object as dislodged pieces of ‘me’, satellite moons that then are knocked out of orbit by the desire of the Other, into theirs.  Tensions of desire and aggression, seduction and rejection, jealousy and revulsion, all circulate.  There’s the being the hide being worn by the body-of-the-woman.  There’s the rescue of the painting from the incarceration of stasis, of being the object-on-the-wall.  From my gravity.  There’s the beating heart now in the picture.  There’s the failure, the admitted need this pleasure reveals.  There’s the sin of utility, of Art becoming use object.  There’s the bitter pleasure of the picture walking away, never to be seen again.  And a fleeting sense of escape in that disappearance, in the courage to give it up, not horde the image, the object, the Thing; that what it precisely needed to live was to get away from me.  There’s the rejection and defiance of the preciousness of the ‘artobject’, and the suffering sweetness of the hidden jewel pulverized and poured  into – mudbloodmilk.

And there is the passage of my work, the picture, through the hands & machines of Karmenlara.  There is the giving up all control of the image, of the object, and watching her cut it into pieces.  It/me.  And in this dismemberment an exquisite suffering, a receiving, a freefall.  I found myself making my best paintings, knowing they would be cut into pieces.  An echo of the bris, ritual circumcision.  I found myself thrilling to the promised disappearance of the work itself, of the absolute certainty that it would be removed from my possession, changed, and eventually sold. 
A metaphysic of marriage itself was being sung. 
The selfsame object, sent into the fire of Union via the being of the Other, emerging changed and alive – and poised to leave, disappear, go:  but wanted by the world.  Here, the world of women.  The partner, my partner, as threshold & bar to the universe of all Other Women.
Inside, too, the subtler aspects of cross-dressing, of sex-switching, of the primordial bisex.

How, over time, the epistle becomes the eulogy. And perhaps always was. 

I think, personally, the Dressworks are, in a sense, the best of the pictures.
The vicissitudes of the market, marriage, NYC, time; my being able to paint much quicker than K could sew & maintain the other burdens of the shop; the necessities of rent, other obligations & emotional states [and the end of the marriage itself] have slowed down halted the production as of now (7/07).  All but a few of the pieces shown here have been purchased, many of them before we got around to shooting the finished piece.  There might never be a second run of garments to come.

Karmenlara's dresses & hats can be found here, and soon, here.

How, over time, the epistle becomes the eulogy. And perhaps always was. 

– A'TYS/MKSV

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