I wrote about some Walter Swennen paintings for Turps Magazine Issue 28. You can pick up a copy at this link:
https://www.turpsbanana.com/issue-28
I wrote about some Walter Swennen paintings for Turps Magazine Issue 28. You can pick up a copy at this link:
https://www.turpsbanana.com/issue-28
Tommy Fury wisely said ‘Remember, it’s always you against you’. The boxers’ opponent is not really the other person in the ring, staring them out. The weaknesses you know in yourself are the things you betray that allow the other boxer to take advantage.
My painting, anthropomorphised, mocks me from across the studio. I have to lie on the floor to avoid its gaze. I put ‘Jungle Rain, 9hrs’ on Spotify and close my eyes. The painting remains vertical, counting me out.
When a boxer is “knocked out” it does not mean, as it’s commonly thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapacitated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time. The referee’s dramatic count of ten constitutes a metaphysical parenthesis of a kind through which the fallen boxer must penetrate if he hopes to continue in Time. There are in a sense two dimensions of Time abruptly operant: while the standing boxer is in time the fallen boxer is out of time. Counted out, he is counted “dead” - in symbolic mimicry of the sport’s ancient tradition in which he would very likely be dead.
Joyce Carol Oates in On Boxing, explaining how when I get up from my extended escape, the painting is still there, unchanged, feet dancing and gloves up ready to go again.
I’m disturbed that nothing has changed since I laid down. I’ll avoid painting a bit longer, lie back down and watch Hearns vs. Hagler 1985 on Youtube on my phone.
Here’s my trash talk to Anthony Joshua, a man who ‘doesn’t want it enough’ to win anymore - in the pub hundreds of conversations about how he doesn’t really want to hurt anyone so he fails everytime, not living up to his physical ability because his mind has no aggression. His mind is on his brand deals, his image has won him Deals with Under Armour, Hugo Boss, Land Rover and Jaguar all worth millions to Joshua and saw him earn a total of £8.9m in 2021 according to TalkSport.
I wouldn’t want to bash up my face if I was in his position either. Sophie Tea wouldn’t make a painting that would potentially ruin her instagram image of aggressive positivity (‘Mini-Manifestations’ limited edition original artwork dropping today 12PM Shop NOW….I’ll choose ‘I make my dreams a reality’) You won’t find a section on her website with titles like Mike Tyson’s cheery ‘I want to rip out his heart and feed it to Lennox Lewis. I want to kill people. I want to rip their stomachs out and eat their children’, 2023, Holographic Paper with acrylic and resin, 25 x 20 cm, £1000, unframed.
The boxer doesn’t run from pain, they run to it, ‘public display, all risk and, ideally, improvisation’*. But Joshua’s brand image suffered greatly following his defeat to Usyk - his stock dropping 35% in a year. ‘Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realise it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.’ says Philip Guston. What can Anthony Joshua want to see? Does he see himself standing over his next opponent, rumoured to be Deontay Wilder or Dillian Whyte, as the ref counts him out or does he hear the voice of Dominic Ingle telling him he doesn’t have the “recklessness” to win, so maybe the fight won’t happen. Every week there’s a new fight announced only for it to be cancelled or postponed. It must be exhausting, promotors, titles, training, photoshoots. A recently deleted tweet from AJ: "I don't know about any talks to fight Dillian Whyte. Everyday. AJ this, AJ that, AJ's hairline going way back but I'll still f*** your girl go retweet that."
I’ve put down my phone after watching 3 more videos of 1980s boxing matches. I take the painting off the wall, lay it on the floor where I have just been, pick up a sander and tell it, “I’m going to rip out your stomach.”
“I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.”
*Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, 1987
*E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, 1979
If you really want to slow time down and live each moment, I recommend having a panic attack. Even a brief four minutes of anxiety, 240 seconds is abject torture in which you can contemplate 60 years of uninterrupted suffering, consider ripping your own face from your skull or lying down in front of a bus only to be trampled first by indifferent strangers.
The body itself, the flesh and bone substrate that we run on, causes much day to day suffering. There are contemporary theories of mind that say the digestive system and its metropolis of bacteria has as much sway on thought and action as the brain. In a future where technology has liberated us from being bound to our mortal wetware will I be able to upload my gut to the cloud? Would suffering end with mortality’s death? What would I be without a body, without emotions and hormones, without interaction with stimuli? I suspect I would have the same capacity for consciousness as a table or fridge. Some peace, some happiness. I’ll take the dread of waking up every day with the horror and knowledge of being: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”*.
Franz Schubert said “No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.” Pessimistic as it may sound, we are all alone, shuffling through permutations of language and pre-verbal communication, anxious to offer subjectivity to each other. But of course this is why people make things and why anyone says anything at all.
There is a certain perverse euphoria when I eventually am released from a panic attack, revelling in the simple fact that I didn’t explode. I want to run up to those indifferent strangers and tell them about the time phenomena I’ve just experienced, grasp their hands in mine and look deeply into their eyes, thank them for their kindness in letting me live. E.M. Cioran puts it best: “We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.”*
*Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’, 1953
*E. M. Cioran, ‘The New Gods’, 1969
Stupid Cupid keeps on calling me.* I’m a sucker for a clichéd romantic tale, how they met (me), how they hate now. Wings and lungs, snakes and sperm, smoking and death, colons and openings. A number refers to a passage from Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada describing a mouth that looks as though it ‘has tasted every bitterness’, but really it’s just shapes.
The edge, the gateway: the audibility of woman’s pleasure in her fluffy yellow knickers. The joy of performance quickly becomes the trap of performance, the show and the mask are both liberating and yet come to be a rigid externally imposed role. Unless it is a mask of your own making, an alternate self that is simultaneously opposite and unilaterally true. An autofiction of multiple selves.
An internal voice joins in the spiteful hate towards women, towards myself. I want to paint a nude like Courbet, a dancer like Toulouse Lautrec. I’ve bound up my mother’s body here, covered it in fur and thrown it into space. The explosion is a nuclear bomb, the blast left faces lit up in immortal smiles*. I really like painting the female body, I can’t help it.
International travel and glamorous love affairs with men old enough to be your father; the problematic reality of heterosexual attraction formed in a patriarchal world. But it’s so fun though isn’t it? The sexy 70s and our current body-positive shame free (female) sexual liberty come with exploitation, murder and abuse. I still want to be Jane Birkin on Histoire de Melody Nelson*.
A realisation of the sexiness of the hoof. Myself as a pot-bellied female faun pursuing carnal desire. But polite and self-censored. A parody of my own previous paintings creating a confused reality between dream, longing and memory abstracted from real place and time.
*Fast Love - George Michael
*Kim’s Sunsets - Fat White Family
*Serge Gainsbourg 1971