Of Wax and Walking Shadows
Thoughts on the making of 'Human Chandelier'
I am upside down, my legs and hips held up with rope. My shoulders are the only point of contact with the ground. I feel a shadow beside me. A hand extends.
The first couple of drops take me by surprise, like jolts of electricity against skin. A surge of adrenaline, my heart throbs against the cage rope on my chest.
The pouring of molten liquid continues.
I feel the thick viscous substance trickling from my knees down to my waist, running from the tributaries into a gushing river, pooling and hardening into the crevices of my skin, casting an imprint of the negative of my body.
I arch my back and writhe in pleasure as the wax reaches my groin, letting out muffled moans of ecstasy.
The warm pulsating sensation of a soothing hug encrusting me in soft warm wax.
Human Chandelier
A human chandelier - an ornament, an object to desire.
I have held this unrealized concept at the back of my mind for a long time. Tom and I have done light wax play before, and I have also photographed him doing a scene with wax with other rope bunnies. I have also been in full rope suspension several times with Tom, but this was the first time we are combining a full rope suspension with wax play, with not just a couple of candles, but several pounds of wax.
The image we have is baroque and deliciously decadent in its excess - a fully suspended body encased in wax, with lit candles placed on various appendages, rotating slowly in a dark space, the flames flickering as the chandelier swings.
I knew that this would be a logistically challenging shoot, a vision that me and Tom would not be able to achieve without a third collaborator running the camera. When we met Eli Schmidt from Frock The World at an event earlier this year, he asked us if we had something we would like him to document, and this was the first idea that came to mind. Sometimes, an idea percolates for a while, seeking the right person to manifest it with. This was one such instance, and Eli was the right person.
We have been following Frock the World for several years, and know many acquaintances who have collaborated with Eli to produce his unique brand of artistic erotic pornography. Eli works with a diverse group of bodies, genders, and sexualities, focusing on the eros and artistry more than the perfunctory ‘money shot’. With a background in fashion photography, we trust Eli’s eye to be able to capture the most aesthetically compelling moments of our concept. When we met up to discuss the shoot, Eli shared his observational approach to Frock the World shoots, and described his preference of being a “fly on the wall”, a witness to the proceedings, which sounds perfect for the scene we were going to create.
I was traveling extensively in the lead up to the shoot, and exhausted with the incessant drive for collaborations, so Tom and I did not get as much practice time with the rope suspension as we would have liked to. The first concept of being suspended from only a hip harness was not feasible. I did not have the flexibility or strength required to sustain the position for the length of time required. We ended up going for a suspension with several more uplines that distributed the weight evenly across the length of my body, making it more of a cradle and less of a stress position.
Then there was the wax. Tom did extensive research into different types of wax and their melting point, and consulted with friends that did fire and wax play to seek their opinion on what might work best. We discussed it with Eli and knew we wanted to go with white wax, which is a departure from the red or black wax commonly used for wax play scenes. We instinctively felt that the approximation of white wax with the texture of ejaculation would be visually more compelling. The wax that was easiest to work with was paraffin wax, which had a melting point of 120 to 150° F, compared to soy wax, which had a lower melting point of 113 to 127 °F. The lower melting point meant that soy wax was much harder to remove from surfaces, especially when it comes into contact with skin, as slight variations in heat can change the wax from solid to a slimy sticky state.
After weighing the cost, and even entertaining for a brief moment the possibility of making our own candles for the shoot, we decided on a mix of three types of wax - soy, paraffin, and stearin. We ended up procuring a sack of pellets of soy wax that we melted over the stove and paraffin wax pillar candles that had a lower melting point for the first coating that would go on my body. After covering the body with a thick layer of protective soy and paraffin wax, we used short shabbat candles and long taper candles that were made from a mix of paraffin and palm oil wax (stearin) for the chandelier candles. These stearin candles were more affordable, but melted at a higher temperature, and gave off a sinister crackle and plastic smell when burning, but held their form much more consistently than the paraffin candles. It was a compromise, but it helped to give us the visual quantity of flames that was required for the scene.
We knew from experience that the shoot was going to require a detailed plan, and mapped out a sequence of events that became the structure of the scene. We pinned the outline of the scene to the wall so Eli was able to refer to it as we progressed, as I was slowly encased in wax and transmuted from subject to object over the course of the evening, and Tom gets absorbed into the meditative trance-like state when we get lost in an intense scene. We also drafted a moodboard, something we often do for more complicated shoots , drawing from Shibari references, performance art documentation, art historical and film references.
With a flick of our wrist, the room started to spin. A quiet gentle swivel, so as to not disturb the fragile flickering flame.
We kiss the wick of an unlit candle against the flame of another candle on the chest, and position it on another part of the body. We hold it in place for a second, making sure it sinks into the pool of wax on the skin, securing its position, before lighting another candle.
Between the right toes, below the right ribcage, the left knee, right knee, between the left fingers and so forth. The room continues spinning and the room sinks into a thick, reverent, and muffled silence.
Time stops, as we hold our breaths, fearing that even the slightest exhale or movement might extinguish these drops of illumination.
A firmament of stars mapping the body.
Candlelight in Completion
It was uncanny that just before this shoot we were watching Wes Anderson’s arched stylistic reinterpretation of Roald Dahl’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a short story fraught in its fetishization of mystical Orient typical of the British imperial imagination at the time when Dahl was writing it.1 In it, the protagonist achieves superhuman abilities by subjecting oneself to a strict daily meditative practice, the emptying of one’s mind by staring into the flame of a candle. Candlelight, or the flame it generates, has always been a part of rituals, of the supernatural, of scientific invention, of art, and of meditation.
I was reading Judith Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence as a means of making sense of what was going on in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the subway when I was approached by an educator who recognised the name on the cover, and recalled with much enthusiasm, her memories of reading Derrida, Homi K. Bhaba, and other critical theorists as part of her comparative literature education in college. She was with her young teenage daughter, who remained obdurately silent and slightly embarrassed about her mother striking up a conversation with a complete stranger on the subway.
They too, were emotionally exhausted from the incessant and confusing news cycle, and shared that they just attended the weekly ‘Compline by Candlelight’ ceremony at the Trinity Church on Wall Street as a way of seeking solace. Compline - from the Latin word for ‘completion’, a ritual to mark the end of the day. This was a half-hour contemplative ceremony of holding a candle and staring into its flame in quiet assembly with others, it does not require affiliation with the church, nor is it specifically denominational and religious. Like Henry Sugar, the meditative habit of staring into a flame as a method of holding one’s body and mind still, is one that promises transformative possibilities. In that moment, when there is a renunciation of solitary subjecthood. One becomes one with what one beholds, alongside others that are performing that act of common beholding, and hopes that a certain clarity is achieved. A clarity that can help serve as an emotional emollient for your fatigue with the world, or, like Henry Sugar, persist on making what is opaque transparent.
Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence (2021) is a continuation of her recent political project that remains faithful to her deconstructivist approach to identity that she is most known for2, and a follow up from her 2018 book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly features on its cover one such transient scenario of assembly referred to in the book, a circle of people on a public square peppered with candles and wax.
In both books, Butler persuades the reader to think beyond the myth of an agential self, or a Robinson Crusoe like approach to selfhood and survival that patriarchal liberalism imparts. As she performatively proclaims:
“If our ethical and political practices remain restricted to an individual mode of life or decision making, or to a virtue ethics that reflects on who we are as individuals, we risk losing sight of that social and economic interdependency that establishes an embodied version of equality.” (57)
It is this interdependency, or relationality, as foundational to being-in-the-world that will allow us to remake our relationship with the world. But beyond human bodies, The Force of Non-Violence extrapolates beyond to consider relationality not simply with other humans, but the more-than-human, she emphasizes that
“we have to think not only about persons, but animals; and not only about living creatures, but living processes, the systems and forms of life.” (58)
Recognizing these “forms of life” is the attempt at finding kinship with the non-human or the less-than-human, and to expand our definition of what appears to be grievable, while recognizing the materialist cost of what supports the claim to being human. Beyond card tricks, this is also part of the clarity that can be achieved in communion with wax, wick, flame, and others - the living or the dead.
Specters That Haunt Our Present
Within the queer community, the candlelight AIDS memorial is a globalized ritual that recalls the potential of intergenerational communion with specters from the past. A seance that reminds us, through the conduit of a flame, of the lives lost to the AIDS epidemic.
The central wax candle that survived from the AIDS memorial was a foundational object that grounds my restaging of Completely With/Out Character, a monologue by Paddy Chew, the first individual to come out as living with HIV in Singapore in 1998. This restaging, first in 2015 and again in 2019, was a postdramatic theater experience that screens documentation from the 1999 performance alongside a ‘live’ reenactment of the monologue, as a means to conjure up the memory of Paddy and reanimate his words.
The wax candle was the only object that was a consistent presence throughout the 1999, 2015, and 2019 staging of the monologue. Beyond being a prop, this candle became a symbolic surrogate for Paddy’s body. In the 2019 restaging of the monologue in particular, we attempted to reinstate the original ending that was scripted in the 1999 production, one that was deferred in lieu of it being a potential fire hazard, which invites to the audience to participate in an impromptu candlelight memorial, distributing candles and lighting them in communion.
This was what I recorded about this candlelit assembly in my journal, closing with a line that Paddy concludes his monologue with:
Flickering remains. Your silhouette flits across the gauze screens, casting a web of light across the hospital bed. A helium-filled red specter bobs to the currents that embrace this arctic room as bodies announce their entrances and exits. We huddle around the triangle pedestal drawn to the desire for warmth. We lean in, shoulders rubbing up against shoulders. We raise our palms towards the light and we feel your fingertips trace their etched lines. We want you to tell us our futures. We listen in anticipation. We wait. We call, and you speak:
“The silence you get during the memorial, during the prayers, is a very unusual silence. It's silent but at the same time, it's a voice. You just feel it, it's just there. The electricity of that silence... and yet, there is a clear voice.”
The Fungibility of Personhood
But even beyond being in communion with other living humans in collective assembly, or in communion with the past that continues to haunts the present, which are both ultimately trapped within an inter-human recognition of grievability, Human Chandelier is an attempt to expand this threshold, to render the body as resistant in its objecthood, in its refusal of subjecthood, with the materiality of flesh encrusted with wax.
The stake of a human body suspended in a state between subject-object, especially with the added vector of race, is one that several writers have engaged with over the past couple of years.3 Specific to the Asian American experience, Anne Cheng writes about ornamentalism, an intersection between orientalism and the ornamental, where she grapples with the historical lineage of decorative inanimacy that Asian American femininity is often placed in conversation with. Hers is a body weighed down with china, silk, or other forms of ornamentation. From this ornate and decorative presence, Cheng builds a theory of the “yellow woman”, and in her salient words, examines the fraught potential behind talking about personhood that is “animated through, rather than eviscerated by, aesthetic congealment.” (2) Cheng’s writing is timely and necessary as it adds a dimension of racial consciousness to ongoing conversations around feminist new materialism and object-oriented-ontology, and the critical turn towards the vibrant materiality of things. I wonder how this theory of yellow womanhood might find affinities with the figure of the “gaysian”, one that borrows extensively, and in turn recursively reinforces, a certain imagined consciousness of orientalized feminine sexuality in the figure of the geisha, Song Liling, or the money boy.
To complicate the situation beyond just thinking about the body as an ornamental object, and the encrusted limits of personhood, what if one finds (as in many kink and fetish practices) deep erotic pleasure in being objectified and the objectification of beings?
In fact, the act of objectification and dehumanization (through puppy play, mummification, and in this specific case, through becoming chandelier), permits a transient erasure of racial signification, and for a moment, simultaneously reinstates and withdraws the fleshy humanity that lies beneath the skin.
It can also, as Fred Moten has pointed out, be a stubborn rejection of liberal humanism’s insistence on transparency. That is, through a wilful obscuring of the self, to refuse certain legibility, and to walk through a crowd masked or blindfolded (a la Adrian Piper) as a tactic of disruption and resistance. This is an abstraction of identity that insists on remaining visceral. A form of disidentification4 through objectification.
I am still working through this critically complicated position, but it does have its origins, as is the case when I read Butler’s position on non-violence, in Buddhist philosophy of a refusal of form, of emptiness, and being-in-the-world.5 This is a sacrificial object, a withdrawn body, a sublimated corpus that demonstrates the fungibility of personhood in its exigent sadism.6 A rethinking of agential capacity in tandem with engagement with “forms of life” that Butler talks about that moves beyond a liberal-humanist reactive refusal of states of objectification.
The velocity of the spinning room starts to calm down, while the metronome of the residue of wax hitting the floor mat continues to mark time.
Flesh encrusted with a mix of flesh, sweat, and wax. Layers expand and condense with every breath. Sheets of solid wax start separating from the skin and congeal into pools on the floor.
One by one, the candles are blown out. A languid conclusion to a celebration, as the room gets darker with each flame extinguished.
The last candle flickers and is snuffed out, leaving an ascending trail of pale smoke.
Of wax and walking shadows. Exeunt.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press, 2018.
Butler, Judith. The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso, 2021.
Cheng, Anne. Ornamentalism. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Henry Sugar was written in 1977, Edward Said’s Orientalism came out a year later in 1978, that built much more critical awareness around orientalist tendencies in British intellectual life. There have been several articles about Dahl’s imperial imaginary latent in his books, that do not shy away from abjection (revolting children). This is one example.
This includes Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993)
I am thinking of black feminist writers Hortense Spillers, Sadiya Hartman, and more recently Fred Moten and his writings on the resistance of the object. More on Moten later in this essay.
I am thinking of José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on disidentification as tactic, but also a Spivakian sense of strategic essentialism.
I cringe a little at writing this, because it is almost impossible to be stating this in English without it being misunderstood as another pseudo Orientalist understanding of buddhism so often trafficked in pop culture. Am I guilty, like Henry Sugar, of turning to mysticism to seek a way out? But where else can we turn to seek alternatives when thought is dominated by hegemonic liberal ideals?
See Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia for further elaboration on the concept of exigent sadism. In brief, this is a form of sadism that moves beyond the dialectic of recognition between what she terms “sensible sadism” (that traffics in transparency, consent, and complete self-sovereignty) and “destructive sadism”. I find this helpful as it is a conceptual tool to think about passivity, submission, and objecthood not a sheer surrender, but as a form of trust and intimacy. As she states in her writing:
“Exigent sadism requires a radical form of commitment characterized by patience and waiting. Contrary to the destructive sort, it is neither rushed nor implusive. Its intimacy is very particular. When two individuals appear before each other this way, experiences outside the habitual become possible: two distinct experiences in an intense moment of intimate connection.” (185)
I admire Saketopoulou’s approach to BDSM practices as an aesthetic experience designed to give the person who opens themselves to receive it the ability to reach a state of “overwhelm.” A state that transcends a conditioned fear of trauma or self-awareness.
Zed, it’s a pleasure to read your writing. You both contend with difficult theory and bring erotic practice intimately together. I appreciate your work! - J