Okay, so, Blood Gets In Your Eyes is about beauty and terror. It’s also about the trauma and futileism of trying to be somebody you’re not. In this performance I am forced to reapply a face of makeup after it is consistently washed away by running blood. To acquire this blood, I traveled to the warehouse district and paid the foreman of a meat packing plant in cash for an unmarked bucket. The blood on my face is real, and cold, and smelled of dank, wet earth. And the blood gets in my eyes.

Rilke said beauty is the beginning of terror we’re barely able to endure. And performance is about endurance. I think there’s terror in a beautiful face. For me it was like a cage. Transsexuals have our own relationship with beauty products. They are tools that both enslave and liberate us. Makeup draws a line around what is feminine. For me, it unloaded a profound sense of failure, the idea that I must reapply this face over and over even as my skin weakens underneath. Blood is also a feminine signifier. I used pig’s blood in this performance - a reference to Carrie, which in itself was a reference to menstruation and the monstrous feminine. I still have a period after five years on testosterone. There’s my monstrous feminine. The blood in this instance is my own leaking body. The dichotomy of transgender tissue - the simultaneous growth and removal of flesh.

I think you can emerge on the other side of terror, but blood gets in your eyes.

I’m interested in the body as a site of simultaneous fascination and disgust. I like to explore the role that body modification plays in identity, and that relationship with desire. As a transgender man, I have a unique relationship with body modification. I modified my body in traditionally feminine styles off and on for 25 years while closeted, and that action - which is sometimes lauded as empowering - was a traumatic, violent experience. I think these two things can coexist. Transitioning was also empowering, and traumatic and violent. 

Morphing gender identity has also morphed the way I groom and modify myself in the pursuit of identity. All of this is inextricably tied up in the need to be desired, specifically in the need to be desired by men. Somewhere in here, perversion is at play, but where? In the scars on my chest? In my shaved legs? Transgender identity is at the root of social anxiety, a symbol for the blurring of the boundaries that were supposed to keep us safe. Perversion knows we never really were. 

In self care I donned the usual dark makeup I favored pre-transition and shaved my legs in a bath of pig’s blood. Lately I’ve been performing alone in front of the camera, thinking about the performative aspect of “self care” as poorly disguised gender play. The camera in this instance is an exclusively male gaze, fetishizing as it ritualizes.