RV-078 Keith Hennessy 1 of 2
I am a book lover. Also queer. Primarily a performance artist, I worked with this book as both a body and as a place—a body that's been cut, the scene of a crime. The best aspect of participating in this project was reading the book, being introduced to this compassionate and courageous theologian W. Norman Pittenger, fantasizing that I’d found the book while my mom was still alive (she enjoyed reading ethics from Christian perspectives), and remembering the liberating power of books and the public library. The more I read from this text the more I felt for the slasher whose blade severed a few of its pages. All previous ideas fell away and I found myself talking to him. I wrote a letter to the slasher (predicting his return to the scene of...) and I burned this letter into the cover, out and inside. Responding to the challenge, “What Would My Mother Do?” (Hmmm she’s so present in discussions of sex and religion, disrespect for property, books...) I decided to simply repair the sliced pages. This is my second burn project, reviving a high school craft hobby, recalling performance experiments of making the body’s text more readable.
Book: Making Sexuality Human, W. Norman Pittenger, 1970, United Church Press, Philadelphia. Third printing, 1975,Pilgram Press, Philadelphia.
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