THE MENSTRUUM 20: Party of One

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN INPRESS MAGAZINE, 16.03.2011]


I’m waiting for the elevator with an awful woman who seems convinced that charisma is measured in decibels. She won’t stop and after nearly ten minutes I’m almost sure the lift isn’t coming, and going to the stairs I can still hear her, screeching and cackling at a poor and silent arts student – ‘Oh, don’t worry about me, dear. I am crazy, I am. Don’t worry about me, I’m crazy.” – who must be regretting her timetabling of this moment to visit the Nicholas building. Taking the deep stone steps by two, I’m now happy for the inconvenience, at my transport’s sudden lack of mechanisation.

It is a tower worth being lost in; twisting clockwise up and around and over and again, and everywhere are lockers and doors on the walls at your chest, positioned above a height that could be useful, and signs glued on tiles and glass doors that suggest an invitation but which are in fact strict in their excluding.

 

Photograph by Tiago Brissos.

Being in this place is being at a party that you heard of through a friend, is like the parties you dreamed of having when you were thirteen, is attended entirely by people who don’t know you but know each other too well, and which started a long, long time ago.  

 



Photograph by Robert Lukins.





All the way, up and up, clockwise and round, there are windows which crack open to a view of the central and hollow core of the building. Where you might imagine a steel spine, the Nicholas has a bare concrete square and a shaft of unreplenished air and the odd birds of blown scraps and rubbish.

Photograph by Robert Lukins.

I would mention urban labyrinths and physicalised bureaucracies and Kafka, but I would then feel duty bound to hire fifteen first-semester philosophy students to suspend me by my ankles and repeatedly pound my goolies with my valueless but tastefully-framed arts degree.

Photograph by Robert Lukins.

   

Now, the seventh floor, I turn and turn and am at the optimistically large donation box that stands guard to the entrance to Blindside gallery. Peopleless, doorless – inside, contraptions are banging. The room is Paul Yore’s and styled with blinding dyes and these set-off clatter machines, and there, a rainbow; a My Little Pony is glued to a revolving record player, a wire tied to her back which lets a bead thump over and over into a circle of drums. Over there, a pineapple strums musical strings. A dildo spins, blue water is spurting into bowls – the room is a horror carnival in miniature.



Paul Yore, Fountain of Sanity, 2011.



I’m through this, thrilled but escaping this, the second room is a halcyon with its wings outstretched. Sophie Knezic’s Fiat Lux is only a sun-white room and a window of digital colour: it is a moment of real peace. In a firetrap gallery, on a maze floor, in a hip and outmoded belfry on the corner of a screaming world; I am for a second in a beautiful truth. In rare silence, I am my own friend, and so, am a god.