Billie J. Maciunas (131)

To what great history
does she refer when she answers
the moon’s terrible pull
with rage and torment
that the earth will not swallow her yet

not the history of multiplication
but maybe of single numbers
she is a straw in the smoke bitten
wind.

©billie late 70s


Songs to dead lovers:

if you have not consented to be my lover
I claim you still
like a cold and killing envelope of snow
over all hope of new growth’s promise

but you consumed by the fierce heat
of elemental will to vanish boldly
elude my crude grasp
you must be an innocent birth
and my death the center of your
blazing heart

©billie 1979


Last Will and Testament:

All that matters is the skeleton. If
In ideal repose, fetal is good--
protective, like Aztec child mummies.
But if flatly forced, let the box be simple
pine. Fast feast of deathly horror, and
eternal peaceful noble bones.
Don’t embalm me. Give my living parts
to the living. Remember me
in your movements, your best unguarded
expressions, as I do you.

©billie 02

Martha Wilson (130)

Growing Old, July 15, 2009.

My Authentic Self, 1974/2011

Before and After 1974/2008

Beauty and Beastly, 1974/2009.

(Images from 'I have become my own worst fear,' at P.P.O.W. gallery)

Excerpt from 'Martha Wilson: The Liminal Trickster,' by Lauren Bakst on BOMBLOG, 10/5:

Martha Wilson’s solo exhibition, "I have become my own worst fear," comprises a series of self portraits that repeatedly distort the self until any fixed notion of subjectivity has utterly dissolved. Spanning from 1974 to 2011, these works reveal Wilson through specific markers in time, and invite the viewer to imagine the lived space beyond each image. Through the juxtaposition of younger and older, of before and after, Wilson makes tangible the space between these captured moments. Her images seem to ask, how did time pass between then and now? Furthermore, what was the embodied experience of that passage? In Beauty and Beastly, a profile image of Wilson in 1974 is positioned adjacent to a profile image of Wilson in 2011, a portrait of the artist peering simultaneously backwards and forwards at herself in spite of and through time. Rather than to spiral into an unending cycle of self reflection and critique, when Wilson looks at herself, she also looks at the viewer, beckoning us to examine the value systems that shape our ways of seeing. Her image and text work invoke the expectations and preconceptions that are written and re-written on women’s bodies every day. The terms “beauty” and “beastly” applied by Wilson to the young and old images of herself reference the persistent intertwining of the personal and the political, bringing awareness to the cultural discourses that frame the female body.

(to read the entire post by Lauren Bakst, follow the link to BOMBLOG.)

Martha Wilson