Sheryl Decterow

I would like to officially announce that if I die before I change my mind about this, I am to be cremated and made into pencils, and people have to actually use them.

ie:
http://www.nadinejarvis.com/projects/carbon_copies

But don’t do it for her project, I want to have all my pencils available all at once to anyone. Price them to recoup the costs. Sell them at an art supply store or something where creative people can access them.

Use them for anything, but I highly recommend drawing. I wonder how the quality of the carbon differs from person to person? that would be a very interesting art project.

Nadine’s project is widely blogged about and people’s responses to it distress me. People are so sensitive in the most pathetic ways and insensitive in the most destructive ways. They can’t face their own self, can’t stand being nude. Magazines are spilling with advertisements of beautiful nail laqcuers, but nail clippings are disgusting; people are beautiful when they’re young, but then they get old and then they DIE and are GROSS. Truth is UGLY so we turn away from it. I call bullshit. Beauty is everywhere. Everything changes. Everything is beautiful. The truth is only ugly when we turn away from it because we are stripping it of its reality and imposing upon it our ideas of it, which are not it and are not based on it. It is not an idea, you are not an idea. You are beauty waiting to become a pencil, which is beautiful too.

The good thing is that shit like this shakes me out of the self-conscious stupor I am prone to settling into, particularly among these vastly hyper-judgmental Minnesotans, reminds me of what I really am and that I don’t care what people who can’t face themselves think of me. I think the drawing exhibit opening tomorrow night will take that a step further by affirming that I’m not the only one who doesn’t jump at the opportunity to write the vast majority of life off as gross. I hope it will.