"...was doing some research on Schwarzkogler and Documenta 5 today [Jan./Feb. 1978]. I realized how very different my work is from those who inspire me. A new name to add to the list is Arnulf Rainier, whose black-paint-smeared-bodies photo were shown at Rene Block along with Schwarzkogler's and Nitsch's in the early summer of 1976 (apparently their last summer, as the gallery was closed when I was in New York in the fall.)
R.S.; Vito Acconci; Arnulf Rainer; Joseph Bueys (sic); Lucas Samaras: :All these men's work I admire and respect and revere, only my attempts seemed so facile when looked at in the context of theirs. Mine has evolved down into a fetishistic recording of how I have changed over the series of days, weeks months.
"and it seems so much like I don't understand their work at all. For the most part, in the things I read today, all the work, (with the exception of Acconci) was regarded as "rhetorical" (concerned primarily with style or effect; showy or over-elaborate. web Am. Her. Dictionary) Overindulgence with the self.
"yet that work fascinates me.
"So what is the work that I do as a result of my study interest in these figures, to whom the name Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti must be added? I take miniature portraits of myself in a an always uninvolved way. Uninvolved in that I shoot relatively without much prior thought, in a method/with a camera that requires little involvement on my part for the completion of the "final" print. My pictures are in occasionally handsome color in order to accentuate my hair, which probably receives more care than any other part of my body. Certainly more attention. My body usually never deviates from a frontal position. Poses.
"In a sense, the photos now are more what I wanted than ever before, because they are delivered immediately to me, I am able to change a pose if the print is not too my liking. So, now that I have total control, why is it that I am turning out such simplistic, on the verge of being cute photos? I almost do not accept them as my own."
