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Comment by Kyle Patnaude on May 29, 2013 at 10:31pm

"Interzone"
2010-2012

Friends of Billy Lee may have often heard the stories from Interzone, the seedy urban vignette of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch. Interzone is a setting where characters enact their most egregious deeds. The manifestation of the intimate into the public propels the social body into the pornographic. The image of a city, its civic organization, and the politics of its massed bodies, are a series of systematic encounters and simultaneous encounters of the sanctioned and that of the deviant. This experience creates a population wherein the institution-- public restrooms, trucks, docks and so on-- accommodate the queer, yet divide it into portions where none, without a knowing eye, can ever see the length and breadth of its whole. Sexual identity directly correlates with visibility. Interzone is the postmodern city, and in the postmodern city, its queerness enacts a reversal, a destruction, of the Bentham all-seeing model of order and perception. An alternate inception of order is derived through the sexual.

This work is a representation of Interzone, the queered and postmodern city, complete with all its cryptic fluidities of perceptibility. It is also a discussion of bodies: social, individual, and sexual. It explores the concept of sexualizing the social body as it transmutes and is felt by the individual, a process by way of pornographic politesse. Walking down the same particular street, visiting the same particular public restroom, viewing the same art exhibition, we all inevitably become linked by action.