I’ve seen a lot of people try to stare down the void and most of them blink, but performance artist Julie Tolentino doesn’t blink, she opens her mouth, that perfect O, same shape your lips make when you’re about to come or about to die (which might be the same fucking thing), and she just RECEIVES. Keeps receiving. There’s something obscene about it, something honest, something that cuts right through all the gallery-approved simulacra of transgression we’re usually fed. This is the real deal: actual human vulnerability as spectacle and spectacle as vulnerability, no safety net, no cut to commercial.
The mouth-as-O, the eternal receiver, Chavela Vargas crooning Soledad from those hand recorders like some ghost transmission from when desire and loneliness were still the same word, and it’s durational, which means you sit there and watch another human being become a vessel. The honey keeps coming. Her throat keeps working. Swallow, spill, swallow again. Sisyphean and erotic and mortal as hell. Because that’s the thing nobody wants to own: that the moment when you’re most alive, most open, most receiving the universe into your gullet, that’s also when you’re most exposed, most vulnerable to drowning in it.
And Stosh Fila’s the other half of this equation, the squeezer, the one who withdraws, every advance and retreat a choreography of power dynamics and love and maybe cruelty. The delicate recapitulation of each swallow. Watching the watcher being watched. Complicity. Conspiracy. The designer of the droplet’s shape, intensity, speed, velocity. That’s trust or surrender or both. That’s intimacy without the comfortable lie that we’re ever really in control.
Memory collector. Signifier of death. The productive AND destructive ecstatic state. Honey is beautiful. The human mouth receiving honey is beautiful. And somewhere in that beauty is the knowledge that we’re all just waiting for something or someone to fill us up or finish us off, and Julie Tolentino just does it with the lights on, with witnesses, with Vargas singing about solitude while honey drips and throats work and time slows down to the speed of devotion or destruction or whatever you want to call that thing we do when we finally stop pretending we’re impermeable.
This is what art is supposed to do.