[THIS IS WHAT I GOT FROM A FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES FORTUNE COOKIE] *
This is what I got from a Félix González-Torres fortune cookie,
i took it destroying the artwork,
his and mine,
ours, one might say,
i broke it apart breaking down physical distance crumbling it
in my mouth, my hands,
and in others.
I got closer
slipping between vegetal limbo
neither sky nor earth
and became contagious from head to foot annihilating hierarchies,
contaminating utility parameters.
Disease is not a metaphor
and that sweet New-York-fragile capitalism
his and mine,
Cheers!
survivor of a China Town childhood with no protective gown,
isn’t either.
- If diabetic, you die a bit
no venus delicious without a Hawaiian shirt.
Our condolences:
japo-cali dumpling topping the cheap meal of attainable wealth, sugarcoated teeth to hide the bitter
mouth
quid pro quo.
One always makes up for it in the illusion of extras, HappyMeal®
or SadOne
like in the nurse’s painted-on smile,
or the gallerist reclining against a plinth,
innumerous scams of the marketing of wellness, used to seduce bodies and invade them
with their tentacles.
Are you getting me?
On this day of no fixed date,
we should have learnt our lesson, for example, with the subprime crisis, for eXample, in seeking an
alternative to property-owning, for eXampLe by not selling houses, artworks, paintings or styles,
names!, through its (no-parameter) externalisation and thus holding in check a) this gentrifying
urban-outfitted society and the b) neo-museumification of its practices and c) cultural productivity
wedded to the relentless legacy of late capitalism
unhitching as we dance the straightjacket of the negotiable and transactional, crushing stereotypes
beneath our feet, ripping up with our bodies the manual of homogenous normativity: a freakshow of
the oppressed and precarious, the discriminated and the condemned, sobre a grelha teste vertical
da prisão rigorista, making faces that somatise the l<3ve we’ve lost.
There’s nothing to lose.
We always had more steps than space.
Choreography: To oligopathy, wealth redistribution; to atavism, world reenchantment; to
asymmetry, anti-epistemicide cosmogony; to empty gestures, losing the fear of anachronism; to
sanitisation, freedom of choice; to the invisible dictatorships, fluid, multifarious social density; to
deliberate ignorance and distributive totalitarianism, barring it from the planet’s official arts panel.
Lights blink, the body bends over the bill poster on the floor, the acid on the tongue as it whirls,
dissolve the candy,
Avoid fossilisation of the everyday.
This is what I got from a Félix González-Torres fortune cookie,
which I put in my mouth
after putting it in my pocket
after holding it in my hand
after holding it up to look at it
successive veils
the symbolic and somatic, aesthetical and ethical transmutation of art as experimental science.
Geometries, colours, modulations,
no speechifying.
Engaging the other openly,
intimately and complicitly,
based on environmentally elemental modes and regimes:
Who contaminates who? Where does the extractivism and individual territorial occupation begin
and end? Who let go of whose hand? Who fetishised? Were you able to step down? Who’s up to
what’s proposed? Who has the privilege of no longer being? What is it that they who show value-
added gratuitousness, generosity and benevolence are really showing? Which circuits should
prevail? Who’s different, who’s original? How do we fill the void of carbon copies spawned by the
creative industry of picture postcards, guide maps, swag and periodicals, presents and products
culled from the museum box, the city box, the safe-deposit box? Where are you standing right
now?
Live participant, a body that gives and takes as the hook-up unfolds, centres itself commits
to the sharing of a values system,
creating sensation,
a body that gives and takes
exchanging glances batting eyelashes…
And in the blink of an eye
The work undone,
it becomes another.
[Interference]
When a work is made never meant to be remembered,
How can we but never forget who made it?
RE: Spectrality is the framework for relational immateriality.
This?… I got it all from a Félix González-Torres fortune cookie,
which had a message to give
“Your present plans are going to succeed”.
If you’re reading this as planned, watch out for the arrow pointed at your uchronic heart.
Speaking from experience,
It's a performance that hurts.
No sugar can stem the blood
or remove the stain soiling life.
All this I got from one Félix González-Torres fortune cookie,
now just imagine what can be got from all the rest.
Fusion as an ooooooooooooooongoing portmanteaux.
The lucky draw:
Befalls us all
But favours only the select few.
End of SMsong.
André e. Teodósio
(Megalopsicolândia, 2020)
Text inspired by the piece “Untitled” (Fortune Cookie Corner), by Félix González-Torres, 1990.
Lisbon, Limbo, 2020.