Brendton Steele

About

I write for myself. There, I said it.

I write for myself and of myself. Leslie Jamison said it best when she wrote: ‘I’m talking about it because it happened.’ My practice is not an exercise in the validity of narcissism, but rather it points to the unabated understanding that the personal is change, is protest, is everywhere, is every body.

The work, being inherently personal, is rooted in the philosophy of memoir as criticism: writing as art/art as life/life as writing. Writing existing in and alongside life: an afterthought/an interval/a tear-soaked tissue/a supernova/an exhibition/an abandoned mattress/a sweaty club/6 am sunrises/a love letter to nobody (and everybody). An ode to experience.

I write for something else, too: art.

I’m primarily concerned with how artworks (in the widest, purest sense of the word) serve as a means to search for understanding, to find community. To see yourself reflected and, for a moment, know you are not alone. How does a reading of an artwork change when viewing it heartbroken or in lust? How does the writing itself shift? I write between myself and the world. I write to find the gap and wedge myself inside it, between brushstrokes and ready-mades. I write to fill a space while inhabiting that space. I don’t see how it is possible to talk about something — anything—which is of/in the world without orienting yourself towards it, to be in proximity, and directly interact with the thing (be that an exhibition or designs of earrings; something else?). We must make the work we need(ed).

There is a strength in vulnerability.

My current project, FABULOUS MUSCLES, is a book-length essay about the gym as queer site. It is a memoir of my body, and every aching soul I’ve met in the gym; of every bicep curl and abandoned sentence. It folds in analysis and critique of artworks and writings which have engaged with bodybuilding, the gym, and the queer body. Alongside are my own experiences of training in this manner (that is: being a “gym-bro” and writer). It trains with Kathy Acker; sprints down the street to a gym in Philadelphia’s Gaybourhood; despairs over flesh and tissue; benches 100kg.

FABULOUS MUSCLES seeks to uncover the meaning of (queer) muscles, and what it means to utilise the flesh as creative device: the dedication to a craft, and the resulting failure which comes along with that, all to make works of art.

Brendton Steele is a writer based in London. 

Email: brendtonsteele@gmail.com