On Torture

I don't like the way of relating everything to sex. If Cy Twombly were watching me working, he would say that my mechanical movement of chipping plaster off the carpet is fucking plaster, and that the product of our reproduction is the imagery. I was even more annoyed when I remembered someone said last week that lesbians don't have penises so they can only fuck with hands. Regardless out of asceticism, I'd rather dig plaster than a vagina.

Before the carpet was buried in plaster, the imagery was defined by the drawing made up of hay glued to the carpet in advance. So what's the point of obscuring the imagery only to dig it out again? If only to kill the work, a knife could more easily dismember the carpet from the back of it. To armor a surface of plaster over the carpet and to chip it off bit by bit with a chisel is perhaps a waste of labor, like the thousand-cut-penalty to deliberately delay death. I don't think torture is pornographic. It is an unequal trial of the power dynamic, a physical pain that the abuser cannot perceive, and an unknown expectation of what the prisoner will reveil. If the piece could survive my torture, it would be difficult for it to speak of its trauma, as it would only remember I as its host of memory and weapons as the language of agency: how I smashed its skin with the hammer and carved its flesh with the chisel, only leaving blood vessels and bones to sustain life in exposure.

The beauty of the thousand-cut-penalty lies in precision. How to keep a human alive as long as possible while removing as many body parts is a science. Unlike surgery which only removes the lesion, in the eyes of a torturer, a human body is white bones hidden all in lesions. It was a treatment without consultation, anesthesia, or evasion. The carpet was nailed hard to the wall, and with eyes wide, watched me cut off its flesh one slice by another. The white, full skin of the plaster became mottled and festered, and the undried plaster inside spilled across my face as I hit every strike, bleeding white. It couldn't scream, and I had no interest in hearing its pain but smashed onto its blood vessels consisting of hay. The capillaries fell out, and the veins broke, an inch by an inch, all the way to the aorta. Bunches of hay tangled here, forming the heart of this composition, experiencing the pulsation of death approaching as I repeatedly smash. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. How much flesh is left uncut? The work didn't need to look at its body to see its appearance, as its body could see clear itself when the pain of the exposed body parts twitched with the beating of the heart and synchronized with the rhythm of my chisel.While the work saw itself in the pulsation of the body, I also began to view the painting with the impulse of my body in the unconscious of the repeated toil.

In the days when people gradually lost trust in beauty, some said that beauty was only meaningful to those gods up on high; so did the dying painting in front of me. It mocked me that the torture satisfying my cruelty was a guilty pleasure breaking the commandment, and my skill of the execution was so bad, that even if I chiseled out all its veins, it was still alive. The work was hanging on its last breath, abusing the lower-than-low of this ordinary artist, who once boasted as some god of creation, with the painting imagery I never expected of coming to. It was the revenge of the painting, where the fetish avenged me with the disappointment I had been awaiting. I will not die so easily, it said. The grass confined between the industrial carpet and the construction plaster was not an organ of the painting, but a reverse parasitizing of nature on human ruins. I’m happy it’s living. It was the grass who compelled me to free it from the plaster, haunting my body to recreate the imagery that the material intended to become.