Boy Parts(26)

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.