Grace Jones and Shucking ~ Kylie Holloway
Find Kylie’s interview here.
“2 Dozen Findeclare or Colchester Oysters on ice (unopened)—Grace does her own shucking.”
-Grace Jones’ tour rider.
This sentence has haunted me for years. First read while I was alone at the Studio 54 exhibit. The danger of cumming on the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum was clear and present. In the aftermath, sensuality sounds like Grace Jones slurping oysters. The smooth, shameless tongue curl. A bass thrum and brass section blare all at once. A sound like what a full-bodied cabernet tastes like. A sound you want to hear between your thighs.
I didn’t appreciate the revolutionary power of horniness until I read that sentence. Raised Catholic and suburban, the journey from shame to joyousness in sex has felt like crossing the Sahara… or the Amazon (wetter, eh). I thought I was done at 26. I was resting, feet and tongue tired, on a lounge chair until I read that sentence. Grace Jones radiating through a simple slurp. What else could be done? I got up and sought others.
In 1937, Peggy Guggenheim and Samuel Beckett locked themselves in a hotel room for three days, leaving only to get more champagne.
Dalí wrote that Lorca’s poetry was so good he had to let him “taste the Dalí asshole.” In a letter to Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo penned “I miss your rough hands.”
Georgia fucked Friday who fucked Josephine Baker because queerness has always been a small town. These are the truths that hearten.
These are words that would knock my uncle out, make my aunt squirm, cause my high school econ teacher to storm out. The sentences they’d teach me to bury.
These are words I wrap myself in. A security blanket woven from past fucking. From the exploits of strangers. Admittedly, if these people didn’t make art, my fixation would be deeply strange. It might be strange anyways.
But in an olive green room of the MoMA hangs Frida’s portrait of herself in masc clothing. A thin chain earring, heels, Diego’s suit, hair shorn across wooden floorboards. She’d crush at the Woods. Words above her reading “Mira que si te quise fué por el pelo, ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero.” Look, if I loved you, it was for the hair. Now that it’s gone, I don’t love you anymore. Laying herself queer as she ends her marriage. I see that portrait and feel something settle into place, a plate shifting, mountains sighing, dust settling. If he identifies as a muralist, he’s gonna be trash. Run lady run. These are the truths that hearten.
Art is the act of extending oneself into other people’s realities. Maybe because of the voraciousness of their work, these horny people and their horny stories are so present in mine. To use an elevated metaphor, I feel we all took a giant parachute, like in kindergarten, threw the
ends in the air, clung tight to them as we scampered in and sat under the ends, making a sexy little bubble. We all lifted this veil together, found our own oxygen in it, inflated our space, got cozy as my Pre-K teacher (sweet sentient cat t-shirt) looked on, confused.
This might just be an essay about how I project on famous artworks. But spend four years as a tour guide, and you notice the ley lines that cross galleries like palm creases. And by ley lines I mean that everyone cool fucked each other and I genuinely think that’s meaningful. Peggy Guggenheim fucked everyone in the Surrealist wing of the Met except Picasso(and good for her). But I’d like this to be an essay on how the one truth that has remained in spite of *waves hands at all of western history* is that queer liberation is attended by queer access to our own pleasure. I’m in love with people who figured out how to hold the keys to their lust. People who made such a sculpture of their life, their art oozed everywhere, in their dress, their walk, their fucking.
This treasure hunt for sexy stories, this is how I experience queer history- flesh and sensuality and richness- snippets of Dalí watching a lover undress, Georgia’s hands through Frida’s armpit hair, Grace Jones slurping from a cragged shell. That sound is a truth that heartens. It still makes me shiver.
