Gina Prat Lilly

An essay on the work of David Cannon Dashiell, based on research undertaken at the GLBT Historical Society and Visual AIDS archives in 2022-23.

"In 1993, at the inauguration of a retrospective that would be his last in vitae exhibition, David Cannon Dashiell (1952–1993) appeared through the door with a boa coiled around his neck. This was not a feather boa, no – it was the reptilian kind. This gleefully performative gesture, a play on the relationship between images and meaning, is only one out of many subversions of signification that characterize Dashiell’s short yet intense artistic career. He was a conceptual artist, motivated by a concern for the mythologies of verbal and visual language, and their role in creating and shaping our reality. Dashiell lived and worked among friends, lovers, and artists in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s. His brilliantly erudite installations played on themes of queer identity and sexuality, as well as the collective pain of a community under the siege of a devastating malady and an equally destructive government, all while in deep conversation with structuralist and post-structuralist theory.

I linger on the mental image of Dashiell and his scaly companion. The feathered boa is already a symbol of hedonism associated with seduction, with queens, with soft fetish, with sex workers. In its animal form, the boa recalls the serpent from the garden of Eden, becoming further entangled with ideas of temptation and transgression. Perhaps this poses a sexy, sexy challenge to the oppressive ideas of propriety forced onto people living with AIDS (PWAs) by the American media and gay assimilationists. On the other hand, perhaps the threat of a boa’s fatal chokehold around Dashiell’s throat, death momentarily suspended yet entirely possible, spoke to the precarity of the artist’s and other PWA’s lives. And yet thirdly and lavishly, the snake is also just a brilliant pun, flung on for the hilarity of all attendants and providing a moment of queer, tongue-in-cheek joy to a grieving community. Sono Osato, fellow artist, friend and now Dashiell’s estate manager, recalls Dashiell’s “shit-eating grin” that night. All these meanings – and no doubt more – populate the small space that was carved out by Dashiell’s pun. It is this gallows humor and critical sensibility that imbues his installations with a lacerating acuity, his pieces spiked with that same disarming ambiguity and multiplicity of signification. And I, for one, am hooked."

"For all the bodily functions and somatic indexes of Dashiell’s work [...] the tone of his transgressions is slant and sly. Images of orgiastic sadomasochistic glut; of rabid man-chomping; of bodies severed, reassembled and sutured at the joints; of lubrication and ejaculation – all these bodily excesses are contained by slick contours enclosing solid blocks of unshaded colour with little visual depth. Dashiell’s style eschews affect, instead carrying with it the wit of the comic-book strip and its facility for double (or triple, or quadruple) entendre. Facial expressions are cool and collected, holding the viewer at arm’s length."

The warmest of thank yous to Sono Osato, Tim O’Toole, and Rebecca Solnit for their time, resources and recollections; to Isaac Fellman, reference archivist at the GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco, for his tireless digitisation of images; and to Kailee Faber, Kyle Croft, and Cea (Constantine Jones) at Visual AIDS, for their sweet trust in the project and generosity in helping shape it, even cross-oceanically.

This archival research was commissioned by Visual AIDS, New York. Read the full piece here.

Triangulating desire, mythos and etymology, "Poikilos" is a work of fleshy ekphrasis, taking seven steps into the lithograph of a cystic liver.

"Poikilos" was part of An Engine for Thinking, a collaboration between the MA Writing cohort and The Warburg Institute.

"In An Engine for Thinking, we dig our hands into the archive to find alluring objects, precise diagrams, oddities, facts, fictions and carefully held stories. At the Warburg Institute, we spend time among open stacks and in cabinet drawers, yes, but oh! we also linger in the entrance, the elevator, the hallways. In the intimacy of these recondite corners, we chance upon novel strands of history, methodology and thought. We tug at these strands in the hopes that something might unravel and find, suddenly and devastatingly, to be unravelled ourselves. We pull apart and are pulled apart by, among other delights, Touch, Cheating, Animals, Repetition, Dazzle and Mistresses."

- "Introduction," MA Writing

The prefix hepa-, used to describe elements in relation to the liver such as hepatitis and hepatology, is derived from the Ancient Greek term ήπαρ (hepar), otherwhere spelled ήδαρ (hedar). 

The ancient conception of the liver as the seat of the soul and its passions casts loose semantic loops between hepatics and ἡδονή (hedone), that tangled etymological origin that denotes a surrender to pleasure. 

Let me gather these loops. Let me speak of beauty. 

A poor, uninteresting, slate-coloured scrap of healthy liver remains at the top-left, but it is easily ignored and looks like it will soon submit to a despoliation of its own making. 

The morbid anatomy is bloated, turgid, distended. Bent on a supra-generative task. 

Hues of oyster blue and dust vivify the flesh. A necrotic pallor is not necessarily white, and its tones appear spectrally indecisive, difficult to place on a chromatic spectrum. Colour briefly discerns ovoid, pinched and vermiform guises, only to pitch them again into amorphousness. 

Boundaries are intimated here and there, but never clearly limned.

The mass struggles with its own containment. How to rein it in when one’s reigning characteristic is to proliferate? 

Somewhere in its contours, a pearl grapples with its own indeterminacy. This is the untold tension of the seemingly virtuous pearl. Lustre betrays limits, disquiets boundaries. 

Shimmer hints at a surface by finding, striking and illuminating an edge. 

Yet, the very instance of shedding light contains, too, a dazzling confusion. A puzzling of the surface. 

At the edges, the liver’s cells are devoted to a perpetual auto-bissection, dissolution, reconfiguration. The lithograph portrays the cytokinesis in a flecked pointillism, a testament to this perennial becoming. 

The infected hepatic amassment glistens. 

That which was once apparent and carried on the sleeve can no longer be observed by the eye. It is unstable, manifold, elusive. The gleam subsumes the surface. 

The liver shifts, quivers. Movement is a kind of opacity, since a kinetic object cannot be stilled and examined. 

The shimmering surface refuses apprehension, perception. There is unknowability, an epistemological instability. Here, the surface tension of iridescence deflects cognitive attention.

Let me consider beauty, like the intrusion of a grain of sand into an oyster’s shell. 

Let me consider intrusion, the cystic kind that makes one lose one’s head. 

Let me consider pleasure, like the attack of an eagle on what could be, by now, your best loved viscera.

Read "Poikilos" in full and peruse An Engine for Thinking.

"Ruminations on surfeit; Mouth as place; or The hollowness of concavity" experiments with affect, ekphrasis, and theory.

The ceiling is ribbed and fans out from a central, hard rachis. The carpet, though well-trodden and used to pattering, is still a trip hazard. It is such a source of frustration, always rucking up and exposing the uneven floors when the door is left open too long! Look here, under the carpet, see the moisture. It always pools there, for the floor is soft and sunken. All around – they would never dare set foot on the carpet! – are these bony overcrowded swirls, all set in tight pink upholstery. And look! They hang from above too. Now you understand that they can, unannounced, come down snicker-snack. Bared at the front – that one is chipped. It once had a keen edge, the subject of much aesthetic consternation. And behind us, bringing up the rear – that one was crowned white in an effort to appease its carping. Look there – the space funnels in the back, anticipating the bile. See the ceiling melt into a pulp that swings down between two hard, red dahlias that secrete pus all year round. The walls sweat with the pressure to be of consequence, precipitating a wetness on every surface. The effort of dragging air into the lungs discourages talking. Winds gargle through here sporadically but this never really succeeds in evacuating the heavy, brothy smell. The smell of things left here too long. You might find yourself wading thickly through them – or wait! there they are, under and above and all around – unseen, but these are the things that muffle.

Things have always filled this place. See my tongue slip forward, cajoling and wetter than before, welcoming your presence here. It is no intrusion, for her mouth is a receptor-cum-receptacle. She has ensured it knows how to receive more than gustatory stimuli. Suckered onto the teeth, peppermint and liquorice tea, inhaler, cock, eccies, finger (not mine), pins, needles. And plenty more, menthol ciggies, valerian, pens, someone else’s pants, salt and vinegar hula hoops. A palimpsestic pile of shit. Horror vacui. A site of accumulation.

She wonders,

I have a mouth so why won’t I scream?

Because this place has been

shoved full, filled in and shut the fuck up

Self-censorship happens in the closed mouth, as the tongue taps rehearsal upon rehearsal on the back of the teeth. I can’t shit. The sucking of the oral drive shares with the anal a certain drawing towards and into oneself, the drive toward gagging and constipation. This drive toward surfeit serves to dampen the echo of the empty, which is to say capitalism seeks to abolish death. The anal retainer is the collector par excellence, her mouth the collector’s room. A place might only be what it is saturated with. A kitchen is only a kitchen by virtue of its stove, oven, sink, pans, and so on, and she is barred from imagining a space without use or contents. By which she means I can only ever be what I fill myself with. Through possession she wishes to become thick with them, taking on their significance and accruing their cultural capital. Mulching it between the teeth, rotten and sour against the gums, no toothpick can dislodge it because she has meshed its haptic boundaries so tightly with her own. To lade oneself in this way is to abhor the empty because it has been dubbed vacuous.

The full-length version of this piece was published in DreamsTimeFree #2: Soft Tissue, TACO!.