The Art of Crossing the Street

Alec Hatcher

Artist’s Bodies Manifesto

I remember the first time I was naked in front of a womyn was when I came out of my mother’s vagina. Smeared in blood and screeching I felt completely mortified. What little hair I had was out of control; my skin was wrinkled and laid loosely on my puny, infant arms. Exposed to the mid wife, the doctors, my parents. I was in no state to be sexy. The next time I was naked in front of a womyn was in seventh grade with Sara Betancour. This time went a bit better. My steel toad Dr. Martins and spiky denim jacket sprawled out carelessly on the floor like a scene from some shitty eighties movie about punk except I wasn’t on heroin and Gello Biafra didnt make a guest appearance to draw an audience. It was fun for a little bit, especially because I wasn’t covered in blood but I couldn’t really enjoy it. I couldn’t get off because I didn’t know how to get my self off, let alone have Sara Betancour get me off. Because see I had, well have, this problem with anatomy. When faced with the eyes of some one else or even worse, my self, I was lost, despite my self-proclaimed punk rock sensuality.

I cannot be sexy until I think I’m sexy. Laying on that alien bed, my fourteen-year-old body was left with out the slightest idea of how to be physical, how to be anatomically comfortable, of how to be the things that make up my body in its entirety. The crooked tooth in the middle of my smile, my boney shoulders down to my third nipple, to my “inny-outy” belly button, to my butt..indestiguishable from the rest of my legs, down to my boney, gangly toes. I was clueless. So now as I stand before you, 5 years later, out of the premature bed of my introduction to sexuality, in ART SCHOOL, amongst ARISTS, I bring forth the question. Am I the only one curious of what exists beneath the carefully constructed fashion of thrift stores and oh so “unconventional” ways of wearing the very thing that suffocates us? I want to take it ALL off. I want to peel pack every single insecure garment of doubt. I want to strip off, unzip, untie every layer of fasade, terror, self-loathing, and self-destruction shamelessly with out hesitation. Because if we, I, every want to produce artwork, ART. I mean ART. Then it has to ALL come off. We’ve seen it been done before. I’ve seen it been done. The musicians that carry the tunes of my body, Thelonious Monk, Fugazi, Lightning Bolt, Converge, Wayne Shorter, The Sunglasses, Thou, Capitain Beefheart. The painters that imagine my imagination, Egon Schelle, Caravaggio, Durer, Gustavo Dore, Otto Dix, Jim Dine. The thinkers that help me think Sudjorner Truth, Emma Goldman, Guy Piciotto, Philip Polmen. We all have them. They all converge and intersect formulating our perception of ART. But if we cannot and do not strip down to what we are like the ones who inspire us, we can never create. To make art or love or passion or fun our anatomy has to be shown as it truly is because how can we be expected to get other people off if we cannot get off ourselves?