1. Why do they talk about guys like that? Ugh, guys. Ugh, men.
The men I know are great. I know three. Two Jeroens: Jeroen Kramer head of basic year & the second I know not his family name - he works in audio/visual services, I see him at good shows, we smile at each other in the corridor. Then there’s N. N is the most beautiful man. N writes in his Grindr bio “I AM NOT TRANS”. He is just a boy looking for a boyfriend. He finds one. He’s very sweet. I’ve met N’s boyfriend and know he is great but don’t know him well, so don’t include him here, in this list of three men.
I know many who are not men who build barricades. Build barricades. Build barricades. Big up the student moment… united, never be defeated.
Ugh, men.
There just not a problem for me I guess. I am surrounded as little by them as I am by women.
I don’t think about pronouns anymore.
The strongest person I know is a “girl”. But they have very small breasts and aren’t a girl. Only on the scale of Ugh, men. are they a girl.
Ugh, men. If I had to succumb and say I had one problem. It would have something to do with work, or even, working out. Masculinity, lord, a labour of love.
2. I speak on the phone to Isaac and he tells me Ruby only wants to work collaboratively from now on. He tells me they made a t-shirt that reads “un-cancellable king”. Rounders, god, a labour of love. They didn’t really let me play rounders when I was “a kid”, I was “too violent with the bat”. Instead I ran laps around the sports hall. Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls. No other boys or girls ran laps around the sports hall. Later, just as many girls as boys smoked in the changing rooms. Girls had more notes to get out of swimming.
*Laurent points at the door and yells, Now get out. I look at him and realize he’s stronger, physically stronger than me, the fact that we’re the same height, that we wear the same clothes, that we occupy space in the same way, that we speak at the same volume, none of that makes any difference. That’s when I realize that the difference between a man and a woman is just a question of weight and muscles. I look at Laurent and see he’s thinking the same thing, I look at Paul standing behind his dad and see there’s nothing I can do, I tell myself this is between them, their little guy thing, I shrug my shoulders, I leave. *
3. I’ve been thinking about any given sculpture’s capacity for rot or decay. I think it’s an interesting entry point to someone’s work. How much has the artist thought about the longevity of their materials? Have these materials been altered or intervened with in anyway that improves or decreases their longevity? I was thinking about it in Ruby’s work, I was thinking “well no I don’t think this artist has been thinking so much about this.” And then I thought “okay the various tables that appear in the work maybe not, but what about the people that appear at the tables?” because that is the big question we are posed by this work, and as a side note/further reading suggestion, the big question posed in Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology : “which one of these tables do I sit at (or stand at)?”. In Ruby’s work we have the following options : The architect’s drawing table which has to be surreptitiously folded from the partition wall, and on which one designs. The gym-bench turned ironing board (or visa-versa), and from which one projects one version of labour onto another. Or the gym-bench turned make-out club, and through which one becomes homosexual. “but what about the people that appear at the tables?” Yes well as I said I think we should think about their decay. Because when we work(out) that is what we do, we decay. Kathy Acker, sigh, she had wonderful things to say about braking down to build back up, how it could be an antidote to writing. Decay is after all a mechanical process and one leaves things behind when they do it. Fluid & flakes. Chunks & lakes. Lead, in the case of the architect, at least in the not-so-distant past. We leave them behind to build something new back up. In this way, the tables are not just places we choose to go to do something. But places we go to to become something. That is why the choice is so crucial.
*Love Me Tender, Constance Debré

Words by Cam Lynch @Soletsoliel