COMMODE




Something I Can’t Help
Tom Denize, 2026

Download as a PDF

(notes app) 27 December 2025 at 5:05am: 
 
i have always felt like a cliche in my own life, too hyper sentimental for my past lovers, keeping two oyster shells from an anniversary dinner only to give one to my partner after we broke up and for them to bury it in the ground somewhere. told i was chronically earnest at art school, “your work just… stews, with sincerity” (derogatory). But it’s strange to feel like a cliche while living in places that exist outside of representation in popular cultural production - there aren’t any romance movies that took place in the subdivisions behind my high school in east tāmaki. but despite this i still managed to self-reflexively romanticise receiving a not-really-consensual-blowjob in the bathroom of my friends parents house at her 17th birthday, wrists being held tightly at my side. anyway, i mayb crave to move somewhere like paris or new york were i can live out my cliche-dom in all its glory. i know that my sincerity won’t really be well received there either i don’t imagine, but perhaps it won’t feel as helpless to live romantically in a place so steeped in it, rather than the ‘post’ colonial nightmare of australia where i have chosen to live for the last 3 years. i see others like myself trying to achieve this here, to what avail isn’t really for me to say i suppose, all i can say now is that to live out some overwrought cliche and not invent it means something else. i got broken up with earlier this year the day after my birthday over the phone, i was in marseille and they were in melbourne, staring out past the city to the ocean and hills beyond bawling my eyes out in uncontrollable sobs i did have a moment to laugh about experiencing such anguish in a place so beautiful, and now i write it further into existence here, solidifying my point of view on the experience and denying my ex partner their voice in all of this, 
how cliche. 
cliche as gesture?? 

Cliché as a word is curious. It arrives in English already carrying the weight of aesthetic failure, shorthand for images, gestures or phrases that have lost their capacity to surprise. Yet the word's origins suggest something different. Derived from nineteenth-century French printing, a cliché referred not to an idea but to a metal plate capable of reproducing the same impression repeatedly. It is thought to echo the sound of its own manufacture, the sharp click of cast metal. The pejorative sense would come later. What began as a technology of reproduction gradually became a judgement about repetition itself. The distance between these meanings is the distance this essay hopes to inhabit. 
 
In the milieu of institutional and economic precarity that surrounds art making in Aotearoa, I keep finding myself caught between two competing impulses. One is an inherent, largely uncontrollable need to spill my guts onto the blue linoleum for everyone to see in all its gore - to make work that bears an embarrassing resemblance to my internal world. The other is to show some restraint. To wipe the lino clean and instead place a respectable object in the middle of the room, one that appears considered, intellectually rigorous, maybe elegant, while bearing almost no resemblance whatsoever to the circumstances that produced it. This is, of course, an exaggeration. But only a little. 

There is a constant conversation happening inside my own practice, off screen, about irony and sincerity, and how much of a personal concession I have to make in order to occupy the narrow strip of land between them. Too sincere, and I risk becoming sentimental, naïve, or worse, a cliché. Too ironic and it begins to feel like I've outsourced my vulnerability to a style. Somewhere in the middle lies the respectable contemporary artist: emotionally available enough to appear human, emotionally withheld enough to avoid anyone worrying about them after the opening. I'm interested in how this spectre of insecurity plays out. I think it has something to do with cliché, definitely, and with how cliché functions (or fails) in places that exist upon the colonial periphery. I could, at this point, launch into yet another meditation on the dangers of tall poppy syndrome but there are way too many of those already. Besides, I'm increasingly unconvinced that tall poppy syndrome tells us very much at all beyond the fact that we've become remarkably attached to explaining ourselves through it. It has become a kind of national origin story for artistic modesty. Where this assessment falls flat for me is that it treats tall poppy as a function of culture and not a function of class. Tall poppy syndrome is so often treated as a uniquely antipodean cultural mechanism, inherited alongside our colonial politeness and our reluctance to celebrate success too loudly. Yet I rarely encounter it discussed as a classed structure. To distance oneself from one's own ambitions—from the possibility of success, or even from wanting success in the first place—has everything to do with the class one comes from, and only a little to do with inherited etiquette. Irony is often described as an aesthetic disposition; I reckon it is just as often an economic one. 

The class structure of Aotearoa has always struck me as unusually difficult to see (in contrast to other countries with less egalitarian ideals). This is perhaps becoming less true as successive governments enthusiastically widen the already cavernous distance between those with very little and those with far too much. But in the cultural middle ground, where most artists imagine themselves to reside, class begins to perform strange contortions. The social distance between someone who grew up working class and someone performing working class in the arts can be almost impossible to discern. Class LARP, maybe. Method acting with scuffed shoes and rolled ciggies. The performance is often convincing enough that it becomes impolite to ask who gets to stop performing when the exhibition closes. Contemporary art, after all, asks us to appear authentic while remaining remarkably discreet about the material conditions of our lives. It rewards vulnerability as an aesthetic while rarely asking after the rent. We celebrate artists for appearing emotionally exposed, for the insistence that they "just make work because they have to," while politely overlooking the networks of financial, educational and social support that make such exposure survivable. 

Perhaps that's unfair. I don't think most people are consciously pretending. The performance is structural. Class itself has become another aesthetic register through which authenticity is communicated, and the art world has become extraordinarily adept at recognising its signs. Precarity, self-deprecation, modesty, the performance of having stumbled accidentally into the arts: these circulate with remarkable ease, while the material realities beneath them remain stubbornly unspeakable. The artist's biography is expected to account for the work, but almost never for the infrastructure that allowed the biography to become an artistic practice. Not because everyone is secretly middle class, but because the forms through which class becomes legible within contemporary art are strangely detached from class as a material condition. We have become very good at recognising what authenticity looks like, and considerably less comfortable accounting for what makes an artistic life possible. 

I'm implicated in this too, of course. I know exactly how to tell the story of my practice in ways that make it appear inevitable and thus legible. The more polite parts of my queerness, rural background to city boy, chronically earnest. These are all true. They are also the kinds of truths contemporary art knows how to receive. The more difficult story to tell is the one about having one parent who had a middle class salary and another who was financially abusive, survival sex work that became sex work for fun, self-doubt while having an overly inflated ego. How do you talk about these conditions without them becoming the axis your practice spins on? Im not sure yet because these stories don't accumulate symbolic value in quite the same way, despite being no less constitutive of the work itself. 

 
(notes app) 27 December 2025 at 9:43am: 
 
“it’s like this: someone falls in love and in a universe that once was closed, suddenly everything seems possible. love and sex are mediums for semiotizing mutation” chris kraus translates guattari - i love dick page 22 i started reading i love dick while sunbathing in my brunswick share house garden sometime in early december, i got 10 pages in and stopped until i got on my flight from auckland to nelson to see my mum and sister for christmas - im now almost finished it while passively writing this in the ‘no smoking’ smoking area outside the regional terminal at auckland airport awaiting my flight to melbourne at 3pm today, there’s a women here, like me, legs crossed, but reading normal people, she’s not smoking. its funny that i write about cliche and wanting to feel emboldened in my own but seeing this very normal woman reading normal people at the airport and i cringe for some reason. i think about a funny conversation i had with ari outside hopestreet radio about salley rooney, neither of us having read any of her books or seen the tv adaptation with heart throb paul mescal, we’re both deeply familiar with the semiotics that ms rooney carries and we both have a deep aversion to being associated with it, i think now that it’s because we’re queer and a cliche means something different to a fag and an ex fag, we are pastiches of straight life that has been flexed and construed through a hole that continually changes shape, squeezing our personhoods through this mutating syntax to find ourselves on the other side now in need of self-deprecating humour and hell bent on a career in the arts 
 

Albert Wendt writes in ‘Towards a New Oceania’ that, "One human being's reality is another's fiction. Perhaps we ourselves exist only in one another's dreams." I wonder whether cliché operates similarly. Perhaps cliché is what happens when the fiction of another becomes the grammar through which we learn to recognise our own reality. If so, the problem with cliché is not repetition itself but the uneven distribution of who gets to produce the images that everyone else inherits. Some lives become the universal archive through which desire is made legible; others remain stubbornly local, lived intensely but rarely reproduced. The subdivisions behind my high school were no less capable of holding love than Paris. They simply never accumulated the representational weight required to become romantic shorthand. 
 
Some people inherit clichés like family heirlooms, passed down so many times that they come to feel like common sense. Others inherit them as aspirations, borrowing gestures from lives that were never intended to resemble their own. To reject the cliché presumes one has first been permitted to inhabit it. For those arriving later (or from elsewhere) the cliché often functions less as a tired convention than as an invitation into a world from which they had been excluded. Contemporary art nevertheless insists on originality as though it were an ethical imperative rather than a social expectation. We are encouraged to evade cliché, to produce work that surprises, disrupts or refuses inherited forms. Yet originality is rarely imagined as something materially contingent. It appears instead as an innate disposition, detached from the economic and cultural conditions that make experimentation possible in the first place. The demand to be original begins to look less like an artistic challenge than a particular way of organising cultural value. 

I wonder if this is why accusations of cliché often feel uneven. Rarely are they levelled at those who have inherited the authority to define the terms of representation. They tend instead to settle upon those still negotiating their relationship to it: the earnest, the sentimental, the provincial, the recently arrived. To call something a cliché is not only to describe its repetition, but to imply that its repetition should have been transcended. Embedded within the accusation is the assumption that one ought to have moved on already. I think all of this tends to land differently for faggots though; cliché means something different to us entirely. Pastiche becomes odd when the script we've been reading turns out to be one we were understudies for at some point or another during our lives. I read the lines over and over again and wonder who they were actually written for. I tended to read them aloud anyway. Some of them felt good rolling over my tongue. Something happens to them when they'reread by someone like me: they take on new, quiet meanings and create new forms. This could become a moment where I talk about camp but I don't want to do that. Camp would offer too easy an explanation for what happens when a faggot repeats a gesture that was never intended for them. It would make knowingness the point, when sometimes the point is that I really do want the thing. I want to find myself inside the perfect composition and maybe not know that I’m in it. 

There is something different at stake in repeating a cliché when you have not inherited the world that made the cliché ordinary. The marriage, the anniversary dinner, the house, the holiday, the breakup in a beautiful European city: these images become exhausted through their endless reproduction, but access to the lives they depict has never been distributed with the same abundance. For much of queer history, the problem was hardly that we had seen ourselves fall in love too many times. We had scarcely been permitted to see ourselves there at all. To arrive late to an image and want it anyway is not quite the same thing as failing to invent something new. 

Class complicates this lateness further. The rural poor faggot arrives at some of these images twice removed: first by sexuality, then by the material conditions of the life being represented. I could understand the semiotics of the anniversary dinner without growing up with any certainty that adulthood would contain the stability those images seemed to presume. This is what I mean when I say cliché feels different from the colonial periphery. The image reaches you perfectly intact while the conditions it represents do not. You inherit the fantasy without necessarily inheriting the means of inhabiting it. Maybe this is why I feel protective of the cliché. Originality asks us to transcend forms that some of us have only just arrived at. There is a strange arrogance in declaring an image exhausted when the authority to exhaust it has belonged so disproportionately to people elsewhere, with more money, more cultural permission, more confidence that the world depicted was theirs to begin with. Sometimes repetition is not evidence that nothing new has happened. Sometimes the new thing is simply the person speaking the line. 

The script stays more or less the same. The anniversary dinner still happens, someone keeps the stupid souvenir, someone leaves, someone cries somewhere beautiful. But the understudy has wandered onto the stage and discovered, perhaps toeveryone's embarrassment, that he means every word. 
 

(notes app) 27 December 2025 at 12:49pm: 
 
i’m now at the international terminal of the auckland airport, this 7 hour lay over is feeling ridiculous now, but sitting parallel to me is an older gay man, bald, statement frames, wearing a Coca-Cola shirt under a tartan blazer, tight fitting black suit pants and purple striped socks in sandals – mirror image to a potential later fag-dom i may inherit. i start to make up stories of where he’s from or where he’s flying to. he’s smoking tailors not rollies maybe indicating a salary job or a wilful disregard to a lack thereof. i laugh when he gets off the stoop he’s been smoking on to go back inside, engraved on it is a māori phrase ‘he piko, he taniwha’ or ‘another great chief.’ lol. There’s a cliche here that i also have an aversion to. maybe because of how likely this future i see in him is one i may inhabit, i think very highly of myself you see and cannot imagine myself falling into this more gauche version of faggotry 

 



Tom Denize is an artist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Naarm Melbourne. He likes to make images. 


←