by Eliza Clark
‘Then why did you leave me?’ I snap. ‘If I’m so vulnerable, if you knew it’d go wrong, why the fuck would you let that happen to me?’ She starts sobbing. She tries to touch me, and I lean away from her hand, moving closer to the toilet. Which, to be fair, has proven to be a stalwart ally in the last twelve hours. ‘Just leave me alone.’
She leaves. I check her blog pretty sharp. At the moment it’s just loads of obnoxious seshy bullshit about being on drugs. I’ll check back this evening.
When I’m feeling a little more able to move without gipping, I check in on Flo. She’s sleeping, face-down on the bed. I leave, get an Uber, no note, no text.
Is it a little bit crackers to stick my head straight into Tesco when the cab drops me off? Yes.
Have I done it anyway? Absolutely.
In my defence, I only have bag salad in my fridge and I think I’ll be badly in need of some potato products by this evening. I’m wearing one of Flo’s shirts, my skirt from last night, still, and have all my stuff shoved into one of her many art gallery tote bags. Luckily genetics and La Mer have rendered my skin flawless and youthful, so I’m fine walking in with no makeup. Hair looks a bit… It is what it is. I still basically look good. I can crawl out of Time Hell and be a solid 8/10.
I buy chips. He isn’t here.
I get home, drop on the sofa and send a text to Will, intending to block his number as soon as I’m done.
Any particular reason why i woke up in your fucking clothes this morning pal???????
And I leave it at that, with the only tangible evidence I have.
therabbitheartedgirl:
Jeeeeeeesussss fuuuuuucking chriiiiiiiiiist Ive had the fucking worst 24 hours I am fucking….. RRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!! I’m literally sat here sobbing off the back of a huge fight with Michael about irina AGAIN. Im really scared we’re going to break up this time. Really really scared, but he just said the worst things about her. Something really bad happened to her at the party on Monday night and he said she was making it up and she was trying to upset me and make me feel guilty and i was just so angry with him!!!! How dare he say that about her???? How DARE he????? I know she has a manipulative streak, and i know when she’s upset she likes to twist the knife and kind of put it onto other people. lots of people do that, it doesnt mean she’s evil and it doesnt mean she’s a fucking liar. So disgusting. And he said ‘any one but her, literally any one but her I’d believe it 100% but shes a fucking monster.’ And he tells me he loves me and he’s just worried about me.
Idk i just feel weird and sick. I love both of them. And i think w my job being 4 days a week and stuff, I’d probably have to move back in with my parents if me and michael broke up. And I just like i dont want to break up with him and its just such a GROSS thing to say but part of me wonders if he might have a point you know? Its a fucked up thing to lie about, and i dont actually think??? She lied??? But she went from zero to blaming me so quickly as well??
Aaah jfc this is sort of messy to explain but ive caught her in lies before. Ive never told her or pulled her on it but ive caught her before, just on dumb shit like her fucking college results like she told people at uni that she got a distinction but she got a merit and that’s the deliberate stuff but she’d also always do this thing where like. So all the time in uni she’d get blackout drunk (when i was with her, and not as fucked up as her) and she’d just sort of fill in the blanks for herself and repeat it for people, and I’d literally be with her thinking ‘well that’s just not what fucking happened???’ Like she’d tell this story about how some chavvy girl had shoved her in a club, and that’s why her knees were bruised, but she’d just fallen over — shit like that all the time. And granted this is some dark fucking shit to fill in the blanks with but… christ im almost not fucking surprised? Im a shit friend for even thinking it. Shit friend, shit feminist. Urgh.
FRESHERS
I wake up a full twenty-four hours later on my sofa, bag of chips completely defrosted in my lap. I bin them, and promptly head to the shower, where I sit under the spray for a solid half an hour, wedged into the bottom of the bath.
I had one of those horrible post-party dreams. I don’t usually have dreams. If I do, they’re always these repetitive, black-and-white things, where I’m squeezing through a series increasingly small doors, or chasing something, or losing teeth. That is, unless I’ve drunk a lot, or taken something.
I dreamt about a boy. The boy from the toilet, I think. He was sitting at a bus stop, and I was trying to speak to him. He started screaming, and I tried to cover his mouth. My hand slipped inside him, down his throat. His head fell off. Still shrieking, his head was looped around my arm like a bracelet, my hand poking out the bottom of his neck. I flicked the head off my wrist, and it smashed on the ground like a plate. Then I woke up.
The dye I brighten my hair with tints the water a rusty shade of orange; it pools behind me, dammed by my thighs which squeak against the bath when I move. Shampoo, conditioner and three going-overs with the most pungent soap Lush has to offer, and I still feel like the smell of Monday night is on me. My nana, a heavy smoker, used to wash her hair with half a cap of laundry detergent; I bet that’d do the trick for me now. I can’t get the smell of fags and booze and weed out of my hair.
I give up after an hour, too hungry for another round of shampoo and conditioner.
The food in my house is limited, but I can’t bring myself to leave. I’m not getting a takeaway: the solo-hangover-takeaway is the domain of women who eat their feelings.
Bag salad it is, I suppose. I grab one from the fridge and open it. I drain a tin of tuna and dump it in the bag, giving it a little shake. I chuck in a handful of olives, a spoonful of mustard, give it another shake and it’s basically a Niçoise salad. I go back to the sofa and check my phone: two per cent battery and fifty-odd notifications, which makes me want to hurl the fucking thing through the window.
I like partying, but I loathe the aftermath. I need to stop letting people have my phone number. Maybe that’s something to do while I’m off – new sim card, new phone even. I’ve got that cash from Mr B burning a hole in a pocket. My phone purrs greedily when I plug it in. Four missed calls from Flo, a series of texts from her, from Will, and one or two from Finch. Finch, I check first; he’s just letting me know he sent me his photos, and could I look at them when I’m finished vomming, and later, could I ring Flo back when I’m awake and able. I reply to him first. I don’t quite have the strength for Will’s essay, or Flo’s simpering apologies. I have twenty texts from Flo and seventeen from Will.
Later. I leave my phone in the kitchen, opting to spend the afternoon in the arms of my archive. All my uni stuff is in my studio. I grab the first two boxes and drop them in my living room. I set myself up on the floor with a coffee, a cushion and my Salade Niçoise dans un sac.
I crack open the lid of box one, marked CSM, FRESHERS in Sharpie. I only applied to art schools in London, and I got into a few, but went for Central Saint Martins in the end. It seemed like the coolest one, to be honest. Colin told me not to; he said the CSM Fine Art course was more for people chasing shock value than people with any actual talent, that it’d be a different story if I was doing fashion, or something, but I wasn’t. He was half right.
We had to bring work to show on our first day, and I’ve never seen so many swastikas or nipples in my life. Do you remember the lad who was losing his virginity as performance art a few years ago? Bigged it up till he got in a few shit tabloids, then just fellated a banana in front of a (presumably) disappointed crowd? That was CSM.
I could have gotten into Goldsmiths. But there was this whole big cock-up with my application. I don’t really know what happened. And the Slade basically only take people from private schools, so whatever. And Chelsea is just… It’s boring, there, isn’t it? Smug. So, I went to CSM, and it was basically fine. A culture shock, but basically fine. I’m quite posh in Newcastle, practically middle-class up here, but there… State-educated, regional
accent, a heavy drinker. The clothing which was fashionable and sexy at home was so last year and brassy and showy in all the wrong ways. Someone asked me if my dad was a miner the first day I was there and I wanted to scream.
Flo followed me down. She fit in better – she’s from Durham, the city, not the county. Not much of an accent, and after a term to adjust her wardrobe, you couldn’t pick her out. She went to Camberwell, which is a banded Fine Art course, and she ended up bouncing from sculpture to painting before changing course and moving to illustration, where she stayed. She went from banging on about how she was going to get a Turner Prize nom by 2012, to crying about how she just wanted to go back to drawing without getting the shit ripped out of her for it. I had no sympathy.
My work doesn’t get good till the end of that year, when I realised that I needed to do something a bit different to separate myself out from the YBA Clones, from the swastikas-and-nipples crowd.
And I’ll say now, I never actually deliberately intended to do stuff just for shock value. I can’t really help it if things just bother me less than they bother other people. That really helped me push my work early on. Everyone else is just appropriating iconography they think is shocking for attention, rather than genuinely having an interest in transgressive subject matter.
My first workbook for the year is mostly notes, pages torn out of magazines, images of women posing that I’d later have male models study while I bent their skinny limbs into place like dollies. First year I mostly got boys on my course to work for me by doing model swaps with them; I’ll sit for you, if you sit for me, and so on and so forth. There was a lad I got on quite well with, for a bit, called David, who was really into exploitation films. I don’t know why I’m being coy – it was David French. As in, Turner Prize nom David French. He was pals with Peaches Geldof for a bit, so I used to see him knocking about in the tabloids, which was weird as fuck.
The first photos I find are of him. They’re quite funny, actually. He’s on the couch in our halls – which I covered in a pink Ikea throw – nude, feet in the air, lying on his stomach. He’s holding a toy telephone I’d picked up at a charity shop, with the red plastic cord wrapped around his fingers. There are two shots side by side, more or less identical, but in one photo David is biting his lip, and looking at the phone, and in the other he’s giggling and staring straight down the lens. Smiling at me. Blushing.
I’ve written underneath, pic 1 is more what I had in mind but pic 2 is better. I peel them both out, and pop them in the ‘to include’ wallet. The next page of the book is just notes, a bit garbled, but you see me work out a good chunk of the driving principle of my practice in two sentences.
Picture 1 is posed and cute and it’s fine but he’s like interacting with the viewer in picture 2. David is giving me very genuine *fuck me* eyes in picture 2 IMO, and that’s why it’s better, because then the audience get the fuck me eyes as well?? More engaging. Does this make sense????
It does. It makes perfect sense.
I flip the page, and a print of one of David’s photographs falls out, from the agreed model swap. It’s a photo of me dressed up as the eponymous character from classic Nazisploitation film, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. It’s a photograph which, in this post-woke economy, would be a massive embarrassment. I think he’s buried all of this stuff, or no one cares too much about his early work, now his shit’s all serious and black-and-white and wanky.
I’m not wearing a swastika armband (David has cleverly altered the outfit and replaced the swastika with a penis) but I am holding a huge dildo. To this day, I have no idea how he procured this get-up. The boots in the photograph are mine, but he did the rest, down to the surprisingly high-quality blond wig. I’m standing on his neck.
If I recall correctly, his justification for this was a weird narrative about being a Jewish man and reconciling his identity with capitalism pushing the Nazi aesthetic, and fetishising big blond women. Shiksa Goddess is scrawled on the back of the photo in his handwriting.
I remember him getting into an argument with the Israeli girl on our course during the crit, where she just had this massive go at him for co-opting a critique of capitalism and the narratives around internalised anti-Semitism to justify objectifying me, and fetishising the suffering of their people. Or something like that. She also said I should be ashamed of myself for playing along with it, and I remember just being like, well, good art asks these questions, doesn’t it? Because, you know, we still had a Labour government at this point and Obama was in the White House, and that liberal free speech shit went down with a lot less resistance.
I offered to sign prints after the crit, because it’s a fucking good photo. I look sick, honestly. The wig suits me. I stripped out the black hair dye shortly after this with the intention of going blond – but I left it natural.
In a later sketchbook from the same year, I’ve taken a few photos of David mid-coitus; this is harder to execute than you’d expect. Just, like, logistically. I kept dropping the camera, because he just kept fussing and moving and whining. I’ve definitely captured the physical and emotional discomfort of the situation, but it doesn’t quite work. I think what I like most in this set are the close-ups. I have a photo of his hand wrapped up in my ugly Ikea bedsheets, and one of his eyes scrunched up really tightly.
Notes under the photos read: promise of fucking works better than actual fucking tbh.
And then he kept pestering me to do it again, which bewildered me for about two weeks until he completely fucked up our relationship, which was very platonic, by the way. From my perspective, at least. I just thought we were two artists who’d clicked professionally. But boys ruin everything, don’t they? Everything has to be this When Harry Met Sally bullshit, where sex always gets in the way.
We were on the bus together, me and David, and he’s talking about this party his friend is having, and she’s freaked out about the amount of people coming to her flat, and has suddenly said that all plus ones are cancelled. He was recounting the conversation, ‘And I said to her, can my girlfriend not even come?’ And I was on the bus thinking, hmm, I wonder who his girlfriend is? I asked him. He laughed.
And then I could practically hear the Kill Bill sirens going off in my head because he meant me. He thinks I’m his girlfriend. I must have made a face, because he went from laughing to not, and flushed bright red. I got off the bus.
Some lass who fancied him in our year ended up having this big go at me for it in the middle of the studios, while he was standing behind her telling her to leave it, and I sat there, let her finish, then smacked her.
This effectively blacklisted me for about six months at uni. The lass didn’t even complain, but I went from like hot, edgy, novelty-northern girl to weird, fighty, state school chav. This idea of me permeated the whole course – I was having tutors referencing my difficult background, and I kept having to correct them.
I drop David’s mid-fuck close-ups in the folder as well. They’re interesting failures, and very embarrassing for him, if nothing else.
My phone buzzes in the kitchen. I let it ring out, then go and collect it. It’s Flo again. I don’t ring her back, but I pick up her texts. She’s all apologies, and panic, threatening to come to the house if I don’t pick up in the next five minutes. I tell her to calm down, and that I just slept for twenty-four hours straight. She replies, whatever happens, you’re my best friend, and I love you. But then she asks if I’m sure about what happened last night.
The fuck do u mean *am I sure*
You know how you sometimes fill in the gaps?
Because i feel like we both know you do that
And sometimes when you embarrass yourself/get blackout you do like to blame other people??
Especially me???
Oh my god go fuck yourself lmfaoooooo
She doesn’t reply after that. I go back to the box. I don’t have the strength to speak to Will yet – the number by his name keeps ticking up and up.
I pick up another
workbook, containing a number of photos of boys on my course (taken before the blacklisting) which don’t quite work, but they’re what I ended up putting together for Barely Legal. Nighties, glossed lips, a lot of pink. The aesthetically pleasing, retro, pastel erotica stuff with skinny, androgynous boys, selected for being both skinny and androgynous. At the time it felt revolutionary, but everything does when you’re twenty. They’re silly. If you were going to take the piss out of my work, and people who make work like mine, you’d make these photos. The proper prints are rolled up in a small poster tube in the box, which I’ll go through another day with gloves and hands that aren’t shaking quite as badly.
This is how I booked my first solo show over that summer, however. I put those up for our end of year show, and Anne Werner asked for my details, and rang a week later to offer me a solo show. She owned this little gallery in Peckham (The Werner Gallery, her own house with the ground floor converted into a gallery space), not huge, but it got me some attention, got me pegged as one to watch in a couple of little art magazines.
The show was in November. Anne wanted more work than I had, so she gave me the summer to produce something new for it, but my well of models had dried up. Flo kept trying to get me to photograph her, and I’d gone well off photographing women. I gave her this big spiel about the problem of the female form in visual culture, how it was impossible to divorce or protect it from the male gaze in the context of the western art world, yada yada yada.
My phone continues to light up insistently. There are notifications from social – Finch has uploaded some pictures from last night – but it’s mostly fucking Will. Will, Will, will you pay attention to me?