Bri Williams at Queer Thoughts

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What a time for an exhibition about soap. What is the history of cleanliness in art, the drains of Gober, the Purell of Puppies Puppies... Under certain conditions old paintings exude soap. Your body itself is barely not-soap, and soap opens your body to becoming not body, cleanses you by blurring self with soap, which goes down the drain, leaving you clean, dry.  Milk congeals skin, becoming subject, but soap is flesh become object, stuff. Classic Kristeva:

...under the cunning, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; horror that they seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration, and hollowing-probably the only counterweight to abjection. While everything else-its archeology and its exhaustion-is only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us-and "that cancels our existence." (Céline)

Bri Williams at Interface

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PR stating the show "powerfully (and aggressively) evokes sexual violence" when no object seems its vessel and instead saturating the air like a humidity. Perhaps the pipe thrust through the chair's ass waves the flag of the content surrendered to. Everything else just accumulating the dew in our search of it, starts to rust and rot because it's hard to keep things shiny clean when trauma lingers, things just sort of fall apart, continuously, like building a tower in seawater while everyone else builds theirs on dry land. Salt has a tendency to creep, to corrode. Not easily cleaned. Soap we consider clean but we wouldn't want to touch a bar found on the floor of a public shower. If I covered you in lye, your body would turn to soap, a simple process of an alkaline solution mixing with fatty tissues, "liberating" your glycerine. Why you feel "slippery" if you get any on your hand. When you turn to soap, called corpse-wax, or scientifically "adipocere," with a wick run through you we could burn you like an incredibly detailed human candle. This is true. Mistaken professors have done it.