Yesterday, I was in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland for the New Zealand launch of Clinic of Phantasms, Giovanni Intra’s collected writings, at Michael Lett’s bookshop. I edited the collection, it was published jointly by my imprint Bouncy Castle and by the venerable LA imprint Semiotext(e), and it was years in the making. The room was full of Intra’s friends and fans. Gavin Hipkins gave a speech, and Kirsty Cameron, Jon Bywater, Ann Shelton, and I read from Intra’s texts.

When I assembled the collection, I was advised to exclude Intra’s juvenilia—when he was ‘finding his voice’—so I left out everything before 1994. The text I chose to read from, ‘When You Sell Me’, wasn’t included in the book. It was written for Stamp in 1990. Pretentious but prescient, it shows the writer Intra was becoming. Here’s the excerpt:

I tingle with joy because I know all my enemies will be pissed off for days and I will glow like jelly and it is all because of you. 

If you choose me I will honour you by chopping off my ear, spitting across the gallery at you, and being a real anarchist. 

I like the space, you like the space, it’s a good space, it would look good in outer space, if I was you I’d send it into outer space. 

You insure everything beyond its value, so that, if it blew up, you would be better off anyway. 

I can’t touch it, they can’t see it, she can’t afford it, they want to buy it, you can’t touch this. 

We used to spend hours looking at encyclopedias and history books, and now we spend hours looking at vital health statistics and pumping cholesterol from our lungs. 

At the opening I wore my tweed coat, my polka dot tie, my green trousers, my armour plated knickers, and I painted my nose red. 

The artist rejects symbolism and borrowing from indigenous cultures, rather he attempts, through a process of reduction and distillation, to penetrate a common level of collective consciousness. 

We know our positions too well. There is enough measured contempt and praise to keep our frustrations and pleasures balanced for a lifetime. 

I’ll do the mail-out, you do the mail-out, she got sent a mail-out, he’s on the mail-out list, let’s hope the mail gets lost in the mail. 

I fuck you and spit at you, you ruin me, you sell me, and this is the best art there ever is. 

Everything would be totally different if the opportunity to sell out actually existed.

Thanks to Michael Lett, Andrew Thomas, Victoria Wynne-Jones, and Samuel Holloway for hosting the launch and to everyone who came. Copies of the book are available at Michael Lett’s bookshop, and soon at better bookstores everywhere.
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