The following text is an abridged excerpt from Rose, In Dialogue With, an artist book that accompanied the performance Rose Awaits performed in the Liv Ullmann Suite of Britannia Hotel as part of Amateur Love Machine

I displayed my phone number in a window gallery for two weeks. 

After the number had been taken down, one caller maintained contact. He would typically phone late at night, continuing to Ask for Rose as instructed. For him, this was not performance.

We referred to these encounters as bedtime stories. There were glimmers of tenderness amidst the service. I took to carrying a book around that I knew would appeal to him.

He had not phoned in some weeks when I received a message from him. He was in a relationship and could not call anymore. He was sorry.

He had never explicitly divulged what he was gaining from our phone calls, nor what significance they held in his life, but I now knew he believed them to be unfaithful.

I was very charmed by this admission.

See Proverbs 5: 3-5. “For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps lead straight to the grave.”

______

Another man. We are sat opposite. Throughout the evening, he takes off his glasses and puts them back on again repeatedly, peering at me.

He says that he can’t focus on my face and that concerns him. He says there is a sadness to me that only breaks when I laugh. He says that I remind him of death. This, on our first meeting.

Open your eye lids

and see it looks good,

drinking poison

and in each sip

on your lip

is wisdom

mind.

…says John Giorno in his poem Scum and Slime. 

John Giorno, who in 1968 began Dial-A-Poem, a telephone hotline one can ring to hear recited poetry.

At its inception, the hotline capitalised on developments in telecommunications and thus flaunted its accessibility. Anyone could phone at any time, day or night, and listen to a poem.

Despite this, Giorno learned the value of scarcity in the work: “I…discovered that creating a desire that is unfulfillable is the ultimate success.”

______

Dressed in a blonde plastic wig and a revealing négligée, the second character in Alex Bag’s video work Untitled Fall ‘95 suggestively drawls “Call me… I know what you want. Call me… Are you boreeeed? Yeah…nothing on TV? Uhhhh. Nothing on the big screen? Yeah... Nothing on the radio? Awwwwww. Call me… I’ll tell you what to do with yourself.”

Later in the video, she holds her hand over the microphone of the corded telephone to protect the caller on the other end. Mocking boredom, she mouths directly to camera: call me.

Her embodiment of the hypersexualised phone operator presents a mimesis, one that parodies obtainability. She is at our disposal, she tells us.

That is, until her tone becomes cantankerous and the dynamic between her and the silent, invisible “callers” shifts from doting to piercing. “I’m hanging up now lover, burn in hell” she declares as she thrusts down the handset.

You might be surprised to hear that, despite her late-night encounters, Rose owes her character less to this archetype than its more subtle antecedent: the hello-girl. A complex object of fantasy in her own right.

In Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the hello-girl appears, perhaps for the first time in print. “The women here do certainly act like all possessed” says the book’s protagonist, before praising the overwhelming gentleness and modesty of the hello-girls.

Seth Lerer uses Twain’s depiction to explain the intricate social position the hello-girls performed. They were, he explains, at the nexus of desire and decorum. Their restrained eroticism charged by their necessarily accommodating demeanour, and the access they had to “little glimpses of life at other seasons forbidden.”

I too glimpsed and was glimpsed. 

I awake in the early hours of the morning to the phone ringing under my pillow. When I answer, I hear a deep voice I do not recognise. He gives me my cue.

My voice, soft from sleep, crackles down the line: “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.” When I have read the script in its entirety, I hang up, slide the phone back under my pillow and return to sleep.

I do not pause to wonder if I will hear from him again.

______

For Baudrillard, the indiscretions of the seductress abound but most reprehensible is her vacancy. “Her ultimate trap is to ask: “Tell me who I am” – when she is indifferent to what she is, when she is a blank” he decries.

I draw to mind Jill Magid’s work Dearest Federica. Rather, I draw to mind a single line in the voiceover that accompanies Jill Magid’s work Dearest Federica.

A woman’s voice reads fictionalised correspondence based on love letters by the Mexican architect Luis Barragán. While it includes excerpts from his personal archive, the text is ultimately authored by Magid.

The letter includes this address: “As you well know, my dear Federica, my greatest desire, a fantastical and immensely ambitious desire, is to fully understand you even in your most secret thoughts.”

Magid hints at the impenetrability of the Barragán estate in the audio, but the pathos of the statement is more universal. 

For me, it is a familiar refrain.

I thought we were being honest with one another; I want to know you he said, almost mournfully.

You do now…I’m not an honest person, I retort.

While it is the plea imbued in Magid’s text that is most pertinent, the letter’s construction, in which the artist’s hand intermingles with the architect’s transcribed yearnings is also compelling. My interest in this fabrication is a confession.

______

“She’s not a good version of herself on the telephone,” he bemoans of his former lover. On the morning after we met, he woke to a voice message from her. The first contact in many months. “I still love you” it supposedly revealed.

“She must have known I had been kissing someone else” he jokes. He adds that he wouldn’t usually mention this on a date, but he has sensed I am the sort of woman who wouldn’t mind.

I feel I am being scrutinised so I am conscious to appear composed. He is trying to provoke something in me that I can’t muster. 

I draw upon Anna Swir:

My body, you are an animal

whose appropriate behavior

is concentration and discipline.

In truth, I only care about the sound of the woman’s voice. 

I want to hear her with my own ears.