Mary Walling Blackburn, a professor of art at Southern Methodist University, has written and illustrated a free online storybook for children, in which the child protagonist, Lee, comes to terms with the fact that Mommy and Daddy chose to abort his little sister. Excerpt:

Lee’s uncle asks: “Why is your sister a ghost, Lee?”

“Mama had an abortion before she had me.” Lee explains to Uncle.

“Sister is a happy ghost!” Lee reassures Uncle.

The author says on the dedication page:

To Little Friends, earthly and unwordly.

Masochists, look elsewhere; between these pages you will not find the “luxury of grief,” culpability’s sharp sting or salty guilt.

No, of course you won’t.

From the author’s SMU faculty page:

Artist, activist, teacher, writer, feminist, Mary Walling Blackburn was born in California. She works and lives between Dallas and New York City. An Art Matters grant has provided her support to examine extraterrestrials as both expatriate and vehicle for rethinking the terms of the “Other”…

Er, right. Here is an excerpt from a magazine interview with Prof. Blackburn:

AL: What does it mean to radicalize one’s anus?

MWB: My anus or any anus? A genderless, nationless floating anus that can be possessed by any and all and none is qualitatively different than my anus- which has been embedded in this biologically female, white skinned, American body. Furthermore, mine is not a “Professional Anus”…it does not earn money; lazy asshole?

So, are you asking me to reveal the radical potential of a universal anus, as category? Do you wish for me to firstly locate it within the European Art History pantheon: to frame it as the flip side of Courbet’s “Origin of the World” which would consequentially move against a hetero-normative grain, eh?

In this interview with Natasha Marie Llorens, MWB discussed one of her underappreciated masterpieces:

NML: The Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Lost Ivory Dildo project offers one of your own answers to this question, I think. It is a formal critique of capitalism, an attempt to visualize a break in the extant economic structure that does not rely on the female corpse. ESVMID is a complex project with various stages but the general premise is …

MWB: … that we start with our longing for an elephant-ivory dildo—we might imagine its use as an unconscionable pleasure because that thing could only be reproduced by extant colonial economies, by the erasure of a species. What is rendered by sorting out that conflict and sussing out impossible loopholes? ESVMID attempts to imagine what it would legally and illegally take to reconstitute this “artificial limb.” To begin with, First Nations carvers from Canada and Alaska would have to agree to create their own evocations from local ivories (walrus, excavated mastodon). None of my nascent research has conclusively revealed that any carvers would choose to do this. However, the speculative aspect of this project sets up a system for that impossibility. Participants, as collectors, will order these ivory sex-objects through a website portal I design. But perhaps the site will always crash before you could complete your order.

NML: Ivory, like a David Hamilton book, is a legally ambiguous material, one completely bound up with the violent history of capitalist colonialism. Inuit carvers are legally within their rights to make ivory dildos for use in Canada, but only some forms of ivory can be shipped abroad. Part of the work is that the participant must assume all responsibility for transportation across international lines. Perhaps, in your fantasy for the project, the viewer travels to Canada and back with the dildo inside him/herself in order to complete the transaction. Thus, the project implicates the viewer in a negotiation that cannot be reduced either to the realm of sexual fantasy or to the realm of an empirical legal structure.

MWB: Yes, that is certainly my intention—to instigate a situation where the viewer cannot land, cannot cross the threshold and cannot step back; hesitation is a politically productive state. For now, I made a spate of drawings and clay figurines based on coveted objects, anxious exchanges, and ancient gossip: after the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay died, her sister, Norma, destroyed Millay’s ivory dildo, burning it not without difficulty.

MWB did an entire exhibition, one that an actual museum actually staged, featuring her drawings and other images of disembodied testicles and man-parts.

Clearly this woman, this professor of art at Southern Methodist University, is deranged and in need of psychiatric care has a rich inner life.

You shall know them by their fruits.