Blue: The Project
Continued...

Impressions

The body is so limited. It can be festooned with clothing and makeup and accessories but it can't be manipulated. Hair and nails can be toyed with but they're already dead. Tattoos and piercings alter the body but in such a way that they become part of the whole and take on all the attendant limitations. I'm not interested in permanent changes which lose their potency upon impact. I'm looking for temporary modes of being which beguile and enchant and resist time by virtue of their transience.

December 11, 1998

Dyed blue, I imagine my skin will be a thing highlighted as a complete entity. Being a real color will literally limn the edges of the body not by emphasizing the limits of the form so much as by emphasizing the continuity of the form.

Being clothed is the norm; nakedness is unusual. I think we tend not to notice this essentially unnatural state of affairs. Glancing at a person you see hands, neck, face, and clothes. It's as if the clothing is a creature in its own right and not simply an artificial layer draped over a continuous, living person.

Being blue will draw attention to the broken whole underneath the layers of clothing. Shin, chin, elbow, thumb will all have a kind of unity they normally lack. Archaic modernist naturalism through artifice.

December 12, 1998

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