Duets

“A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll ‘have’ to get used to existing quite ‘naturally’ within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, ‘fastened to’ the 'presence of absence.’” 

- Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

I never met Caroline Finnerty but I have seen her. Once lying on her back in green boots, gazing up at the sky. Another time drying Simons’ hair in a bathroom lined with bottles of perfume. Then hiding behind a bouquet of blooming narcissus, doused in sunlight. She stares directly into the lens, perhaps aware the resulting image will be a piece of Simons’ archive and her legacy; an investment in their respective futures. But the gaze penetrates even deeper, hurtling past the shutter and settling on the eye behind the camera. It’s the intensity of a mother looking at her son. 

A few months after Caroline’s passing, Simons photographed her denim skirt in his backyard. In the image, the blue fabric stands up on its own, architecturally signifying a presence as if an invisible body was wearing it. Ten toes–presumably attached to Simons’ feet–wearing chipped pink polish rest nearby, emphasizing the contrast (and conversation) between his physical body and the absent woman inside the skirt.

In Duets, Simons pulls Caroline in closer by inhabiting her material presence. His photographs take the form of self-portraits, and there are hard rules of consistency to observe: the visible power outlet, white walls, and cracked floor. The studio becomes her dressing room and, with each piece of clothing, Simons becomes someone else, subverting the burden of her belongings through his injection of life. 

Draped in his mother’s clothing, Simons plays, moving through confines of masculinity, over waves of grief, and into the uncertain future. The scarf Caroline wore to school meetings transforms into Simons’ dance partner. Her dancing shoes sturdy his feet as he straddles the gender binary. The gaze shifts: Simons now examines himself through Caroline’s lens–her clothing. Simons is looking at his mother and we are looking at them both.

-  Lydia Horne

“A boy’s best friend is his mother,” exclaimed Norman Bates, the notorious killer in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Jealousy and madness took hold of poor Norman when he murdered his mother Norma and her lover. He mummified mom’s dead body and pathologically wore her clothes when he killed women. He became his Mother. 

Simons Finnerty’s Duets intuitively summons a long lineage of horror stories, like that of Norman Bates, that ties together the death of a mother with the birth of a new self. These mother/son tales are dark, dangerous, and in terms of gender and sexuality deeply problematic. They cast an ominous shadow of grief’s creative gaze. 

Do I dare dip into the dark waters of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein? Victor Frankenstein was also a man grief-bound by the death of his sickly mother. Victor says in sadness after her death day:

“When the last of time proves the reality of the evil, then actual bitterness of grief commences; yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connexion; and why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? My mother was dead.”

Latin poet Catullus waxed poetry from the Greek myth of Attis, the long-haired beauty, and his genderbending deity-mother Cybele. When Attis was sent off to marry a king’s daughter, his jealous mother Cybele went into a raging fit and drove Attis to madness. 

Lovely Attis wielded a knife and castrated himself. 

“Ah wretched, wretched spirit, grief will grind

You down forever. What human shape have I

Not undergone? A woman — I — a young man — I —

an ephebe — I — a child — I!”

        Catullus 63 (trans. Ranald Barnicot)

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Attis was transformed into a pine tree.

Call it what you will: the uncanny mother, the sick mother, the great goddess Mother, all a grandiose affect — the theoretical threading, spinning, and weaving of a tragic event that befalls us all. All mothers will inevitably die. The death of the body that birthed us into being beckons a horrifying truth. When our mother dies, we the children must eventually die too. The paradox that our birth is a descent to death is the broken toy we play with our entire life. Always terrifying, always comical. 

The horror genre is our ritualistic dance with death. It’s our way of dwelling in the pleasure of the flinch. What is the endgame of the horror? Whose death do we gaze upon? The mother or the son? We have an artistic lineage that springs from grief, yet the creative output is always a warning sign.

To all that: my dear friend Simons says thank you but fuck you. I’m wearing my mother’s clothes sans madness, psychopathic killing, and Promethean invention. I won’t turn into a flower or a pine tree. I’m wearing my mother’s clothes because I love her. Because she has more style than you ever will. Because she is and will always be mine. I’m wearing my mother’s clothes to be cruel for you. To teach you how a mirror really works. So you can look at me and I can look at me and we can look at me together and cry into laughter for my loss, and what inevitably will be yours too. 

Simons wears Caroline’s clothes because they are beautiful. Because he is beautiful, and she is too and will always be. Horror doesn’t need to be here. Duets chose to dwell in beauty instead — grief that turns the clock backward and forwards. Simons figures himself into a mother-God and departs from the unending narratives of queer people highlighting madness on a page. To be transgressive is to be ironic. To hell with irony. Simons’ photographs upend post-modern imagery. 

Grief is hard, it lasts forever. Laugh and don’t figure it out. Caroline stood for joy and laughter. She toasted to never figuring it out. She loved the comedy of the tragic. And through Duets, Simons is not just communicating with Caroline, or us, he is forgiving the lineage he summons. He is saying that it is possible to keep madness out of grief. That grief is beautiful and funny and, most importantly, alive. 

- Tess Gruenberg