Mari

Slaattelid

This is a Text

Øyvind Berg
jan. 2002|Article

The text can be habit-forming.
It is hooked on art.
The art is hung up on the wall.
It gives the impression of being harder to impress than it is.

This is because it has fleshed out its form.

In the shape the art’s in now it barely manages to hide its movement.

The problem is that the art is so sensitive, socially unreal.

It acts vaguely and intimately in public:

The art is to conceal its abuse of life.

The art is nailed to the wall:
an artform so hard, it loves to crack.

It can’t stand pretending anymore.

It blushes when people look
at the gravity, a classical hue:
when you can’t stand to lift the cadaver.

To live is to die.

Everyone that dies is in great shape.

So we chose this as the art’s final resting place.

But the ceremony was a fiasco.

The burial isn’t framing the deathbed.

Mari Slaattelid can read art like an open book.

Books have words inside them.

This book looks you right in the white of your eyes
with big, buckled, monochrome rainbow retinas.

Inside books, meaning usually falls asleep after a short and pleasant high.

The meaning’s always black, never white.

Black as hell is everything and white innocence nothing.

To our pinkish-gray race
everything looks rosy-red, except ourselves.

The art blushes sitting on its pink cheeks, squeezing out people’s vision.

It’s lonesome for the art, lonesome to blush.

We’re not just talking about shame, pride, broken veins and love.

We have our identity, it’s nobody elses.

We are dependent.

Shit in our socks, put them on and go on.

The art squirms through the lines of the text.

The sun shines on the other side of the wall.

The art needs sunshine.

The text shoots shadow.

They get entwined in the dusk
shade each other like corpses:

The art gets so many fingers it blushes when it tries to fold its hands.

The text’s got as many fists as Mother Earth has Black-Eyed Susans.

The art is a cold tart steaming hot.

The text shakes stiff white.

Art sweats.

No verbal concealer can hide its blush
until the eyes are closed for good
and the text cries from 20-20 vision
and art joins in the song:

I can lift my ass and walk
the theoretical line of aesthetic options
with stochastical analysis, just in case
as long as I don’t have to live the life I don’t.

Au dodo! Les lolos! Miam-miam! Le panpan! Le pipi!

The text dolls up crowds with Khmer Rouge.

It will never say the same again
then, no one will ever be the same
now.

(Thanks to Ståle Hermanrud)