On a Mattress Cover

2011-2013; Ten 5.5 x 10 inch glass slides containing seven original SX-70 Polaroids, one fragment of a mattress cover, and text printed on silk organza displayed on stainless steel shelving. Installation. Dimensions variable.

Text printed on linen: “You asked me to explain what happened when you and I went to the department store around the corner from what was home that summer to find a mattress cover for the bed. I just keep replaying what remains of the scene at the counter in the linens department in my head, re-ordering the elements of that moment when she turned, what lead up to it, what happened afterwards like specimen slides that refuse to stay put. I keep thinking about how Sigmund Freud went from developing a new method for staining microscope samples of nerve tissue to the investigation of what symptoms would appear through talk on that couch. Pressed up against the limits of understanding, the scene in line at the linens department shifts under the glass of its perspectives—the crossing of what I imagine it might be like in your position (and I am no more certain of how it feels from mine), from hers, from somewhere outside the immediate dynamics of the encounter and yet also waiting to pay, as a witness, an injured party, an analyst, as if the details and material stuff of daily life were the dossier for a case study, the evidence from a crime scene, a legal case, the charged and anxious terrain of seepages and stains to be kept at bay, the keepsake residue of a hot and bothered afternoon. What stands out most for me is that even though you didn’t recognize all the phrases she used, you felt their sting anyway. One word in particular reverberates: the charge of ‘iindecent’ and its echo of outcries over ‘indecent exposure.’”  

You know that I was asked to write a response to the question ‘Does public sex matter?’ for Petite Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public. The little blueprint of a book of drawings and collected commentary is on your shelf. In it you’ve read how the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized sodomy but only by extending equal protection not so much to sex whether in private or public but to the private exercise of ‘enduring personal bonds.’ Buying a mattress cover might seem the perfect symptom of internalized shame in this moment in which sex for its own sake and a politics of sexual freedom would appear to have given way to the evacuation of the street in a flight to take cover under the domestic refuge of home-making, the compulsory act of a domesticated queerness, the tidy housekeeping of sex that doesn’t just stay home and clean up after itself but anticipates any potential leakage, prophylactically encasing itself in the white linens of assimilation. But what trips you up may well be that the question of whether public sex matters collides with the problem of what constitutes an affront to public decency on a mattress cover that doesn’t hide or shield but rather serves as the projection screen and contact sheet that exposes how the borders of public and private are not only permeable but no boundary resolves the soaking bleed of desire and fear around what sex is or should be. You weren’t kissing me; you weren’t even holding my hand. Perhaps it was in the crackling atmosphere, the electricity of your body, the air of anticipation about what you would do with me on that mattress cover not impermeable but ‘ultra-breathable.’”

Exhibited in Our House!!: Unsettling the Domestic, Queering the Spaces of Home, curated by Lex Lancaster, Curatorial Lab, Elvehjem Building, University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 2013.