Reflections on Amorous Relationships with Avant-Garde Media

Such naughty girls. There's something of a sweet perversion in the Kegels for Hegel project, which is the sweetness and perversion of the duo that forms its core. The rest of the K4H contributors orbit this nucleus, offering valences of meaning that color and penetrate the core project, shifting its gravitational force in at least four dimensions. There's the undeniable attraction and attractiveness of the two units—a fusion which teases fission, but only ever teases. All that is solid melts into air. Add to this ether the charged atmosphere of pioneers who posited subversive affinities. Jack Smith, Bruce la Bruce and YouTube. Each in their way radical forces. Queer to the core.  

Jack Smith the first. Who else would play with androgyne identity while flaunting his bits in a tangle of flesh and hair and pubes and silk organza? Persona is on display, not as strident individual, but as blurred identity, enmeshed in the confusions of the other and the self. Where do I stop and where do you begin? It's hard to know, when all the players on the stage could claim the title Queen of Technicolor. Maria Montez, eat your heart out.

Bruce la Bruce continues the thread, but gives Smith's delicious camp a punk bite. Here we have the dopplegängers to K4H, an uncanny twosome that confound our ability to distinguish. Are there really two? Or is it just the same in nuclear fission? An identity replication, or a personality crisis? You're a prima ballerina on a spring afternoon / change on into the wolfman / howlin at the moon. Everything's starting to blend / back to one. Fashion of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. While the fashion is fierce, it's the flesh that fixes the ga(y)ze. A little jiggle here, a little bounce there. And one final squirt. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. All over your face.

YouTube. Breaking all the distribution and copyright rules. Subversion par excellence. The mass disseminator sowing the queer seeds of Kegels for Hegel. We must cultivate our garden.

--Christiana Laragues 2015

Christiana Laragues began (s)his artistic career as a child virtuoso in the classical piano-cum-circuit party. Laragues currently orchestrates design and material culture interventions between NYC, São Paulo, and Miami.