mauvais--sang

[mauvais--sang]

"My skin isn’t a protection — it’s open. The wind blows right through it into my insides. It moves through me, takes parts of me with it, puts new parts in their place. I’m drowning in light. Light is a fluid I inhale. My eyes are closed, so my body is lit from the inside out, glowing like a jellyfish in the sea."

—Michael Gira, "The Consumer, Rotting Pig," The Consumer, 1994

[mauvais--sang]

"As you walk, carrying the bag, the earth is spongy, dense, and resilient beneath your feet. It has the consistency of a corpse. With each step, your feet press down on generations of dead ancestors. Their bodies, their rotted and transmuted flesh, have become the substance of the earth. When you eat, you ingest their essence — the fertility that survived their decomposition. In this way, they live through you, by your consumption of air, food, water. When you breathe, you breathe in a mixture of gases their bodies exuded in the process of decomposition, reassimilating into your body.

The air, being blood, is hard to inhale, but I learn. I relax and let it in. My body floats through it, subsumed by it. I breathe, swallow, and think blood. My imagination stops where blood ends. Blood surrounds me, drowns my sight, so that when I think, before an image forms, it’s consumed by blood. I’m withered, ancient, a child drifting through a thick red universe, pulsing and gorging myself on my own sentient blood. This blood knows me, licks me, keeps me in a perpetual drone of self-negating orgasm that sends waves of pleasure through the furthest pools of pumping red consciousness."

—Michael Gira, "The Consumer, Rotting Pig," The Consumer, 1994

[mauvais--sang]

"I feel myself communing with everyone from here inside my hole. I’m part of the infinite mind. My huge eyes, like polished black stones set in rubbery pig's flesh, are fixed greedily on the fanfare of images on the screen, none of which I recognize as relating to anything beyond itself, as it exists there, formed by the light. The “face of a man”, for instance, is not the face of a man — it’s a discrete form with its own life emanating and constantly transformed by light. I’m not aware of myself watching it. I’m afraid to move because I don’t want to destroy the balance."

—Michael Gira, "The Consumer, Rotting Pig," The Consumer, 1994

[mauvais--sang]

Josef Sima

Orpheo´s Gate, 1966

mixed media (wasched watercolorl, ink) on paper

Works on Paper

54 x 35 cm

[mauvais--sang]

Joseph Sima pour Pierre Jean Jouve

[mauvais--sang]

Christer Strömholm

[mauvais--sang]

Stockholm, c. 1945

Christer Strömholm

[mauvais--sang]

"Everything merges eventually — everything is organic. It’s impossible to distinguish one thing from another thing. When your mind is emptied of selfishness, it crumbles and dissolves in the water. If I cut at my body and concentrate correctly, I won’t feel it. Each time my heart beats, it jerks violently and whips my spine loose, tugging at the base of my brain. Memories move through the clotted and rotting forest inside my head and crush the present beneath them. My memories don’t belong to me. They’re as unknowable as a centipede fluttering its legs in the dark corner beneath the sink. When an image moves through my nervous system, it’s with the predatory greed of an intruder. My body’s laid open, transparent, defenseless. Each second of time is an individual insect feeding on my blood."

—Michael Gira, "Why I Ate My Wife," The Consumer, 1994

[mauvais--sang]

"It was the middle of summer. A constant regurgitation of corrosive yellow soot spilled out over the houses from the elevated freeway, burning my skin and eyes and tinting the neighborhood with a golden pigment that sparkled like sharkskin in the sun. The heat clung to the smog. It was heavy and painful going down into my chest, infesting my body with toxins with each breath. I was mildly drunk, sitting inside the house with the lights off and the curtains closed, sweating. I watched the blank screen of the television reflect the glow of my cigarette and imagined the hovering red ember was me, and I lived in the arid world of tubes and electronics behind the glass."

—Michael Gira, "Empathy," The Consumer, 1994

[mauvais--sang]

[mauvais--sang]

Rudolf Němec (1936-2015) — An Autopsy [oil on canvas, 1967]

[mauvais--sang]

[mauvais--sang]

[mauvais--sang]

“The Ambivalent Gift” [Digital Collage, 2018]

[mauvais--sang]

[mauvais--sang]

Michael Bastow (English, 1943) - The Creek 1

[mauvais--sang]

Michael Bastow (English, 1943) - Cherry Trees