PUPPET POET BLOODSUCKER, by Eileen Myles 2022
Daniel Merrit on RM Marco Pezzotta, Bianca Benenti (fka Real Madrid), Bloodsuckers,
Swiss Institute New York City, 2022
Bloodsuckers is a restless nocturne by collective Real Madrid. The exhibition, their first in the United States, showcases a new body of work that expands on the tribulations of dealing with bed bugs. Founded in Geneva in 2015, Real Madrid stages exhibitions in which hand-crafted objects mingle with readymade commercial products to foreground intimate experiences within larger social networks. The collective, whose appropriated name is a knock-off of the ubiquitous Spanish soccer franchise, works through the ways in which sexuality, illness, fears and attachments are perceived and narrated across time by dominant culture, prompting opportunities for refreshed understandings and camaraderie. Bloodsuckers builds upon the artists’ sustained engagement with the uneasy processes of navigating disease, stigma and shame by shifting from considerations of interpersonal transmission to something more parasitic.
Across centuries, from department stores to subway benches to movies theaters, bed bugs have thrived, forcing entry into the most private of spaces. In Bloodsuckers, Real Madrid invokes these pests and the phobias precipitated by their infestation as catalysts for digressions on hospitality and the dynamics between guests and hosts. Nightly, human bodies serve as oblivious feasts for their unwanted bedmates. Barely visible but all-consuming, the parasites infiltrate body and mind in a way that can never be fully absolved, as the residue of their presence persists beyond extermination. In the words of Real Madrid, Bloodsuckers is an attempt to scratch the “psychosomatic itch so hard to exorcise.”
In the gallery, a garment conveyor cycles incessantly and generates a metallic rhythm. The numerals of a digital clock pass along this nervous circuit, an horological kopfkino. Three bedbugs, carved from wood, take form here as playground equipment, perched on spring coils. Varied in size, awkward and barbed with grips and handles, these parasites appear unable to accommodate riders. On the wall, silhouettes of fidgety bodies rendered in hand-made crochet reveal themselves within the fabric of rumpled bed sheets and pillowcases, evincing a night without sleep. These cut-outs, soft scabs, allude to bites and to healing.
In “Puppet, Poet, Bloodsucker,” a new text written on the occasion of the exhibition, Eileen Myles asks “Who are the bloodsuckers right now at this moment in 2022 in New York?” In conversation and song, Myles and their five puppets . Bedelia, Montgomery, Oscar, Casper and Crocky—discuss the answer.
1, 2 — Clock tower, 2022. Garment conveyor, vinyl stickers. 542 x 200 x 73,6 cm
2, 3 — Guest, 2022. Wood, metal, rubber, plastic. 78,7 x 64,7 x 54,6 cm
4, 5 — Table manners, midnight banquet, 2022. Bedsheet with crochet. 190 x 208 x 5,8 in.
6 — Ravioli walls, tortilla carpets, 2022. Pillowcases with crochet. 152 x 43,2 x 5,8 cm.
Swiss Institute, New York, 2022
A twirl a vortex a coil. “don’t you like fleas? Well, I think they are the prettiest little merry things in the world.”
RM had bed bugs recently, so did Burberry and Victoria’s Secret. Once you confess it people will often share their own stories about parasites. At first I suspected it was syphilis, called in the past the great imitator because of its resemblance to several other pathologies, but its rash shouldn’t itch. It took two more enigmatic weeks to realize what was happening at night on planet me. Unable to decipher your bodily messages, you start focusing on small things, the tactic of the minutest details in your life that are possibly responsible of this reaction, so you start excluding certain food, avoiding sun, water, AC…
Eyes revolve searching for whatever is tiny and tend to avoid the bigger picture: larger than life like a Dali’s canvas to get lost in a twirl trop mignon as tigers stomp on your back and a point of view is melting as a chocolate bar at the sauna. Is the benefit of seeing everything under a microscope, the benefit of scientific gaze that gives a chance to the ugly, the scary and the unknown to become fascinatingly abstract and even avant-garde. And these smallest things (minuciosas) feed of your sleep.
The bugs walk a nightly scenery at its highest vulnerability, head to toe across the happy trail pass, pumping blood out and injecting a thinner for up to five min/meal, several times a night. They inhabit their food world like in a kids’ tales with ravioli walls and tortilla carpets. Every sleep is a midnight banquet at yours, and your valuable and cultivated self gets scandalously recessed to a nutrient for another, a colony, a class taking over sugary high-rises.
Who is a bloodsucker? The lazy profiteer, the one who benefits from the work of the other, a boss. The pied piper of Hamelin it’s a popular tale about parasites and mistrust that ended with a theft of progeny, an enchanted generation carried away boogieing. The one who steals progeny becomes proletarian?
The professional who took care of our bugs had a pied piper logo on the white van (couldn’t help imagining children in it).
At dinner, the host demands good table manners to their guests who must entertain with good jokes and stories.
I remember at school once a small insect dropped on my paper. Then another one and another one until I realized that lice had no more space between my hair so they fell among the numbers of my math assignment. If I were a monkey someone would have searched through my hair as a way of bonding, “be my guest…”. After realizing you’re infested it starts a descent into madness, spinning head, loads of laundry, plastic wraps, getting rid of dear things. Parasites are always an itchy reset.
A brain on parasite has a willpower that doesn’t belong to a single self anymore but it’s shared with its guests’: rabies makes the infected dog oversensitive and aggressive to facilitate its spreading before the host’s death, Toxo makes rats and humans more benevolent towards cats (their final host), and it seems like HIV terminal patients go through an end phase of intense craving for sex. This childish parasite parabola weights on the stomach, a paranoid parkour turns the brain into a carrousel where secrets circulate like lice, blurry rats, an obliged Totentanz. An eye spying on the scene from a small hole, are they gone? In the morning always prefer long sleeves to cover-up.
RM (Marco Pezzotta, Bianca Benenti)