I bought a bar of lavender soap shaped like a handprint. The Tocker wrapped it in tissue and whispered, "Use it before a difficult conversation."
And indeed, looking closely, you see the grain of the paper is bruised—pressed so hard in places that the fibers have split. The drawing is a scar.
"Both."
It is here that I saw her in the flesh.
"The Scribe erased them," she said. "That’s the deal. The drawings keep the sting. My skin forgets." She let the shift fall. "Which do you think is crueler?"
The largest work in the show, "The Gallery Watches the Gallery" (153–23–17), is a panoramic mural done in sanguine and sepia. It depicts this very gallery. In the mural, a crowd of faceless patrons stands before a drawing of Droo-Cynthia. But inside that drawing, a smaller Droo-Cynthia stands before a mirror. And inside the mirror, a tiny Tocker points at the viewer.
The Tocker explained: "Each stroke in the drawing corresponds to a real stroke administered during the sitting. The artist, known only as The Scribe, works in real-time. The graphite is the paddle. The paper is the flesh. Droo-Cynthia does not flinch. But the paper does." Droo-cynthia-visits-the-spankers-drawings-gallery-153-23
Droo-Cynthia sat on a simple wooden stool in the center of the room, wearing a gray linen shift. She was not roped off. There was no pedestal. She was reading a newspaper.
She folded the newspaper carefully. "The spankings are choreography. The visibility is the actual punishment." She stood, turned her back to me, and lifted her shift just above the knee. There were no marks. No welts. Only faint, intersecting lines—like longitude and latitude.
For the uninitiated, the Spankers’ Drawings Gallery exists in a liminal pocket of the city—partway between a Victorian conservatory and a defunct server farm. Its current exhibition, numbered 153–23 (the “23” denotes the twenty-third iteration of their “Persistence of Discipline” cycle), features the enigmatic patron and frequent subject Droo-Cynthia. I attended a private viewing. I left with more questions than answers, and a peculiar urge to sit on a pillow. I bought a bar of lavender soap shaped like a handprint
The Uncomfortable Gaze: Droo-Cynthia Visits the Spankers’ Drawings Gallery (153–23)
She lowered the paper. Her eyes were the color of wet slate. "You mean the spankings? Or the visibility?"
Exhibition 153–23 closes at the next full moon, or when Droo-Cynthia decides she has been seen enough—whichever comes first. It is not a show for the faint of nerve or the rigid of morality. It asks: What is the difference between discipline and devotion? Between a drawing and a bruise? Between a visitor and a voyeur? The drawings keep the sting