I cleaned her mouth with a washcloth and walked her to the other end of the apartment and settled her into bed. She lay down. Then I left her and returned to the bathroom and cleaned the vomit with a big roll of paper towels, which one after another I discarded in a garbage bag. I remember the pungent smell that made me hold my breath, the yellow liquid slime with small brightly colored bits of food in it. I remember that I spilled some bleach, too, which left white spots on my jeans. I worked hard to make sure that no trace was left on the floor or walls or behind the toilet bowl. When I moved quietly down the hallway toward the bedroom, I heard the noise of Mother crying. She didn’t cry, at least not in front of me. She hadn’t cried at Father’s funeral or at Grandmother’s or Grandfather’s. Her sobs were strange, somehow inhuman. She sounded like a dog that makes strangled yelps and yowls when it tries to talk, and then came a long, hoarse shriek that made me stop short in the hall, an extended howl of agony. I felt my face contort as I leaned against the wall outside my parents’ bedroom, listening to my mother. I wanted to go to her, but I was afraid to look at her, afraid of her feeling. I waited. I waited for the worst to end. By the time I went in to her, she was calm. Again she apologized. I told her there was nothing to be sorry for.
There are nights when I can’t sleep, and I lie awake thinking about The Natural Mask, which means that I think about Mother and her story, and how to tell it in the film. I do not want it to be too neat and tidy. I do not want to explain away the mess. She would have hated that. Over and over, I have looked at my film of her just a year before she died. She is sitting in her studio beside the Empathy Box, talking into the camera. At one moment she speaks directly to me. She says my name, and when I hear it, I always feel a quickening inside me.
“We live inside our categories, Maisie, and we believe in them, but they often get scrambled. The scrambling is what interests me. The mess.”
Patrick Donan (review of The Suffocation Rooms, Art Beats, NYC, March 27, 2002)
“I love the heat, don’t you?” Phineas Q. Eldridge smiles as he talks about his installation at the Alex Begley Gallery. His first solo show consists of seven enclosed kitchens connected railroad-style by doors. Each room is a little hotter than the one before, which means every visitor must get ready to sweat. The downtown performance artist, known for his gender-and-race-bending monologues at the Pink Lagoon, has made a move into visual art. Each kitchen of The Suffocation Rooms features two large stuffed figures, a chest, and a creepy wax character that might have popped in from another galaxy. Theater is part and parcel of installation art, but Eldridge has brought his overt staginess to this series of rooms.
According to Eldridge, the piece has no message. And yet, it is hard not to think of American culture wars while passing through his otherworldly kitchens. The eerie intersex person rising out of the seven chests speaks directly to the LGBT community. The box (perhaps a little too obviously) is also “the closet.” Eldridge came out in 1995 and has been exploring gay and racial identities in his work ever since he launched himself as part of the underground cabaret scene.
And the two oversized, stuffed humans? Could it be the white America of right-wing “family values”? Eldridge is noncommittal. Twisting Susan Sontag, he says, “Interpretation is dangerous.”
After 9/11 a lot of art has just looked irrelevant, but the claustrophobic atmosphere and the gradual decay and destruction of the seven rooms address the smug insulation of most Americans, who were locked in their own materialistic dreams until they were shocked out of their complacency by the terrible events of last September. Alex Begley offers his own take on suffocation. “This installation has genuine impact. It addresses our situation now.”
Zachary Dortmund (review of The Suffocation Rooms, Art Assembly, March 30, 2001)
The interest of Phineas Q. Eldridge’s installation The Suffocation Rooms at Alex Begley lies in its subversion of the clean aesthetic associated with avant-garde modernism, as well as the easy pop consumerism of the Young British Artists. Its invitation to the spectator, however, remains private. Unlike the practice of an artist such as Tiravanija, whose open works invite DIY interaction, Eldridge’s closed rooms are walk-throughs. This is not fully relational art, to cite Nicolas Bourriaud. It is not altermodern. Nevertheless, the successive real environments may pack a punch that is ultimately more subversive than the accommodating relationalism advocated by Bourriaud. The transgendered figure that reappears in each room summons the delirious machine subjectivity of Guattari, a self-technology of desire and a body without organs, which echoes Eldridge’s life as a queering performer onstage. The chaos of the final room has genuine political bite.
Harriet Burden Notebook K
April 19, 2001
He is clever, not as Felix was clever. Felix knew how to excite collectors, how to flatter them, how to make them imagine they were the ones who had truly seen and understood the work of art in front of them. This man wants all eyes on him all the time. He films himself every day, as if the camera tells him he is alive. He would like to be an escape artist — that, above all, I think. Defy nature or appear to defy nature’s limits.
I just want to work and pull off my scheme.
And yet, I like him. He has an almost weightless bounce. I have a feeling he will want to play, because the manipulation of appearances excites him. For him, the pleasure is almost sexual, a form of titillation, yes, of rising. Tumescence. This I can feel. It is not the aging Harriet who attracts him, but my talk. He is not Anton, my green mask, or Phinny, my blue one. Phinny and I were each other or enough of each other to skip along in tandem, a duet, two whistlers out for an adventure or misadventure, P & H. But Phinny is leaving me. He’s fallen in love with the Argentinian, and I can see the lights have turned on in his eyes. How I will miss him. It was easy for us to mingle.
Rune, a name made of stone, another pseudonym altogether: gray.
He has a tic. He licks his front teeth as if checking for food.
I want to stage Rune. I want to discover the works that are his works but which I will make. Rune will be my Johannes the Seducer: terrible, sly, brilliant mask. The Kierkegaard commentators have missed the heart of the ogre. They suppress the sadistic thrill.