I can't remember when I wrote this. I think it was kicking around for a good length of time before I started to cut the text. It's been performed a couple of times at spoken word events, but the intention for yonks has been to publish it as an artist book, and I'd started handcutting the text as full page intaglio plates a few years ago. It's taken a while. People who know me well might recognise the pattern... But nothing is immutable or definitive. Even this publication has seen changes on the fly as I've finished cutting the plates. The illustrations came easily once I'd got the format sorted. The materials - especially the 'Izal' shiny toilet roll, I've kept stored for possibly well over 20 years, with the full intention to use them for exactly this sort of project.
"Our Lady of the Flowers" was Jean Genet's first novel. Written in 1942/43 during his incarceration for persistent vagrancy, petty theft and 'lewd acts', Genet wrote the novel in pencil on sheets of brown paper, provided by prison authorities for the purpose of making bags. According to Sartre in his foreword to the book, a prison guard discovered the first manuscript that the prisoner Genet had made from his "unauthorized" use of the paper, confiscated the script and burned it. Undaunted, Genet rewrote the book from scratch. The second version survived and Genet took it with him when he was released.
Genet's novel tells the story of Divine, a drag queen who lives in an attic room overlooking Montmartre cemetery, which she shares with various lovers, the most important of whom is a pimp called Darling Daintyfoot. One day Darling brings home a young hoodlum and murderer, dubbed Our Lady of the Flowers. Our Lady is eventually arrested, tried and executed. As their tales unfold, Genet performs a transvaluation of all values, making betrayal the highest moral value, and murder an act of virtue.
The poem comes from a story attributed to the origins of Jean Genet's "Our Lady Of The Flowers", which I came across around the end of the '90's, and centres around the dichotomous nature of dependency and release embodied by the possession of such a mundane object as a pencil, affected by its use in the context of confinement. Temporary release is merely respite. The title 'Venus', is an allusion to both a well-known brand of pencil and the ancient Roman goddess of love, morally corrupted in Genet's novel by the inversion of values, virtues and sins.
"Our Lady of the Flowers" was Jean Genet's first novel. Written in 1942/43 during his incarceration for persistent vagrancy, petty theft and 'lewd acts', Genet wrote the novel in pencil on sheets of brown paper, provided by prison authorities for the purpose of making bags. According to Sartre in his foreword to the book, a prison guard discovered the first manuscript that the prisoner Genet had made from his "unauthorized" use of the paper, confiscated the script and burned it. Undaunted, Genet rewrote the book from scratch. The second version survived and Genet took it with him when he was released.
Genet's novel tells the story of Divine, a drag queen who lives in an attic room overlooking Montmartre cemetery, which she shares with various lovers, the most important of whom is a pimp called Darling Daintyfoot. One day Darling brings home a young hoodlum and murderer, dubbed Our Lady of the Flowers. Our Lady is eventually arrested, tried and executed. As their tales unfold, Genet performs a transvaluation of all values, making betrayal the highest moral value, and murder an act of virtue.
