hot press
by skazka

hot press

skazka

Summary

Morf experiences Dease's work at closer range than intended.

Notes

Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 18395846.

Chapter 1

[Is Morf Vandewal a critic, an influencer, a curator, or all three? All these questions were on my mind as I visited the Echo Park installation of Vetril Dease's three-dimensional works last Monday morning...
- Verselet Aïd, arts & culture correspondent for Bookplate]

The figures of men with the cherub-faces of catalog models, the figures with men's torsos and the back halves of circus animals. Of course, he thinks, there's a latent incestuous dimension to it -- very Francis Bacon. These were the paintings Dease never wanted anyone to see. None of them were intended for purchase or display, Morf sees that now, he knows that now, but least of all these -- decoupaged faces under thumb-printed varnish, Black Dahlia hinges at the waist. Vetril Dease took the materials available to him and he made do. Catalog pages, anonymized. There's something distastefully immediate about it all, and the impulse to collect images is a nearly universal one.

Morf doesn't know why he does it, tugging apart two sticky pages glued together with the secretions of the ages, slipping a thin blade between the surfaces like some kind of jizz scientist. Not very archival of him. Might have caused surface damage. And you thought using blood as a fixative was bad.

Of course, he really shouldn't touch the piece at all; even that is an unthinkable transgression he's allowing himself as some act of perverse snobbery. Not without gloves, at the very least -- some kind of soft unbleached cotton glove, or nitrile, tot give you that odd condom-wrapped feeling. It isn't the subject matter that unsettles him, but the materials -- thick flaking adhesives, Frankenstein stitching, sticky resins and stiff paper pages. Bifold and trifold pages folding out to life-size, Hobbes' Leviathan in bondage silhouettes and Boy Scout decals. Damaged, now. Cut loose. Morf takes a step back to appreciate it, and the figures swim before his eyes.

[Composition evokes a shrine -- at its center stand three panels, salvaged from a hardwood cabinet dating back to the first decade of the 20th century. These panels are tiled with muscle magazines and household catalogues attached to their original binding (see pic) cont'd
- @slivered_eta, Twitter]

Like a Magic Eye painting, it shimmers between genius and mediocrity. How transgressive, how brilliant. How trite, how canned. Sexual transgression in three frames, an eloquent documentation of absolutely solitary sexual practices, a true visualization of the outsider mentality in full flower. A swell of muscle, or an off-center nipple -- swarming phalluses, seamless impenetrable surfaces, buttocks with no cleft between them -- Morf traces along a lacquered torn-paper edge with the end of a stylus, following the line of a leg that becomes an arm, a trunk, a phallus, a man's grinning face. There's paint involved, of course, but it's more -- what's the word?

The stylus tip rests against Morf's bottom lip thoughtfully. There is something very wrong with this piece, wrong in a way that exceeds and spills over its visual content -- you can't expect the product of such horrors to have a particularly sunny fantasy life, but there's something more to it than masturbatory horror, something else. It fills the gallery floor, it unfolds to fill the whole wall -- Coco had made it sound smaller, more portable. Easier to hide. Private. This piece is practically what you'd call life-size. Bigger than life. Composed on a human scale. He wants to touch the surface, to feel the burr of paper edges snagging under his fingertips. He wants to feel.

*

He's feeling it now, all right.

The thing extends an appendage toward him -- it has a whole host of them, cocks like hands, or hands like cocks, long sinewy tentacles with bony joints like a conga line of elbows and knees. One of them wraps around his throat -- slimed and muscly, wet and turpentine-scented. Another works at him steadily and quickly with the convulsive motions of a masturbator's hand -- quick chafing strokes that make him regret being circumcised, more so as the minutes stretch on past the point of tolerance.

[After the season's earlier surprises, some of them pushing at the boundaries of good taste, I wasn't certain what to expect...
- Chloe Boom, writing for About Town]

Has it been hours? He must have lost consciousness a time or two already, but the sensation draws him back. Without sight, he contemplates the pressure-colors on the backs of his eyelids: blackened red, bruise yellow. The crackling-paper sound is all there is, the sound of stiff pages turning and creasing filling his ears and the sensations of complete envelopment. There is a hand spooling in his guts, intangibly tangling -- moving in him the way nothing could possibly move, less like sex and more like surgery. Vetril Dease may not have had a happy childhood, or a great deal of human contact, but he had a remarkably vivid imagination.

Nobody's going to believe this. More significantly, nobody's going to believe he didn't do this on purpose. Didn't do this to himself on purpose. One of those sex accidents.

[Projections of Dease's work covered the gallery's blank surfaces, accompanied by an ambient slip-and-slide soundscape of well-lubricated pumping and gasping…
- Independent review, L. M. Lytton]

All these things are happening to his prone body, and yet his body is remaining still, rigid like lockjaw -- Abramović, Bennett, fucking David Blaine, enduring on display while pantomiming a lack of resistance. His body remains where this thing has positioned it, sprawled over the edge of a white plaster platform where his escape attempts failed him and the edge of a moderately priced luxury sneaker had snagged and sent him tumbling down. Sprawled on his face. This isn't even the way he likes to fuck, Morf thinks, and an absurd laugh escapes him like a child's cry. Josephina should see him like this. Eaten up by artwork.

It feels like forever, that flared sleevey horsecock fumbling around between his legs like a frat-boy hand as if seeking an orifice that doesn't exist. He still gasps when he's ultimately penetrated, not at the touch of cold wet flesh on his robustly well-used asshole but at the fact that it's not flesh at all, the texture of the thing that's slinking into him is resolutely artificial. Morf is crying and he doesn't register it, or the blood is running down from somewhere behind his hairline, or there's no blood at all and the wetness painting his face is an entirely different sort of secretion

Something is inside of him, and it's bigger than when it went in -- like a balled hand neatly folding into a fist, sliding inside him with the fine-boned grace of a constrictor and then seizing itself into a knot. He's already climaxed so many times that his prostate feels like it's been kicked in with steel-toed boots. This is the end of sensation, the end at which his body shuts down, and every obscene movement registers only as a gesture. Whatever it ejaculates into him, it smells like stale air, like wood and masking tape.

Something that cannot possibly exist is fisting into him. If he falls asleep, he's going to die here.

[Central to the composition is the figure of a prone male body, mummified in vintage muscle magazines.
- catalog description, unattributed]

Morf is an image, immortalized forever -- papered over like a blown eggshell, with the lacquered paper clinging to his nose and mouth and eyes and throat like a second skin. Maybe they'll cut him out of it when they notice he's missing, or maybe he won't -- he'll go on living like this, roved and pinched by unseen hands in a cocoon of misplaced sex. It will go on until someone else picks off a flake of the salty varnish and a little of the contamination rubs off on their hands or on their clothing, transferred to an eye or a mouth or some other wet orifice -- until they carry away a particle, unpaid-for.