Resonate/Obliterate IE

Below is footage of the 4 artists who performed on the Saturday 2/21 performances

plus some audience responses. If you missed "Resontate/Obliterate I.E." - this captures some of it. 

      

I made a longer VIDEO of the week-long series of events, and posted it at _velvetparkmagazine_  www.velvetparkmagazine.com

Full VIDEO, click HERE (7:56 min):

to the right, on the top video panel,

includes interviews with Jennifer Doyle and Shane Shukis about this event

titled "Performance Art: Athey & Tolentino"

Also, the longer version has images from the full week of art talks, evening films, the artist workshop, final performances of Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Zachary Drucker, Heather Cassils, plus the bonus interviews and clips.  

If moved, comment on the video on the velvetpark site.  Go to 'comments' under the story "To Live and Art in Los Angeles." April 13, 2009. (scroll down www.velvetparkmedia.com to to the stories).  Two responders express eloquently how significant Ron Athey's work is.   Totally worth the read - so head over to VP if you are interested.  The force of their comments reflects Athey's own bravery in his work.... 

Enjoy!

COMMENTARY

So, Jennifer Doyle discussed in her seminar lecture during YOU BELONG about the recent work of Aliza Shvarts. She suggested that many audience members fail to take seriously their own resistances to "difficult work." She traced the paths of resistance and translation surrounding Shvarts' art project, linking public and juridical forces into an agenda of re-routing the queer desire/s of Shvarts' work into normative representations of femininity, heterosexuality, art.  So, unlike Roland Barthes' notion of shutting down as boredom (a response that seems benign, but actually is not), the shutting down to Shvarts' project also seeded the active component of re-scripting (and attempting to erase) the agency of the piece, and Shvarts.   

I believe I experienced this first-hand when I uploaded the full-length documentary vid. onto the web. During the course of the day of the upload as comments rolled in from readers of that site responding to Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Heather Cassil's and Zachary Drucker's work, I noticed exactly what form 'shutting down' takes. In e-conversation later, a friend suggested to me that this is how blogs work -- that blogging responses come out spit-fire and reflect the insular community that has been forming around the blog/website, no matter how global the digital reach. If that is the case, so be it.  But I didn't and don't like leaving the work of some of my favorite people (the artists and theorists in the piece) to be chewed on by intolerance, so it took some time for this Buddhist to rest.

It was my pleasure to get smeared trying to strike up a conversation with the commentators about the work - let's be clear about that. There's nothing like stepping out on the line for what you like.

Here's a quick historical question: Do some lesbians think they got to their L-Word without the hard work of radical queer artists and the visibility of leather culture? Just look at the line-up of writers for the first season and dig a little deeper.  Check out the Opie images in the L-Word opening sequence montage.  A knife has to cut sharp before the dull one's come in to spread the butter. Remember the episode where gallery curator Bette's exhibit is being censored?  Those episodes dove into some of the histories and practices of censorship in queer visual art. L-Word took it on.  

DIFFICULTY

In the video interview, Doyle describes some of the reasons audiences might shut down in the presence of the work of Ron Athey.  Work involving blood, nudity, engaging in sado-masochist gestures, and offering a different model of feminism than that offered in the mainstream media  (Doyle writes about this in her response to Julie Tolentino's "Cry of Love") can trigger, for some, the emotional, psychic, physical, and culturally-informed intellectual brass doors shut in an instant. 

What Doyle did not say in her discussion is that the 'shut down' responses to radical durational queer performance of this sort -- because of the strength of the images it produces and the depth of its charge -- is empowered with arrogance, delivered casually.   It sounds obvious writing it - but call me kind, I didn't know.      Power has an attitude;  cultural erasure, easy; and, intelligence selective.  Take the eulogy to Eve Kofsky Sedgewick today in the news. Written by a regular contributor, it is a moving testament to the intelligence and deep compassion of the writer.  And the list goes on -- I am into this magazine!   The discussions on the site about the oil industry and eco-cars -- to me it has a pulse on a progressive picture. So, why does this kind of progressiveness stop at radical durational performance?  Doyle suggests in the video that this type of work may not be everyone's cup of tea. So be it too. No big. But, really .... why do folks get so fixated on Athey's string of pearls? Why is "difficult art" so easily dismissed and joked about in one fell swoop?  If this were a piece on Carolee Sheemann, would things be different?  

The discussion quickly went from trying to engage the work, to a criticism of artists, in general.  There was no apologies for the dismissiveness, and no attention to the sacrifices these artists are making of their bodies. For me, certainly that is the disappointing aspect of the mis-interpretations of durational performance art. How much more obvious can it get -- that's real blood there.

True, Derrida excites.  But, frankly, so too does a car engine.  I use languages I know more than Latin to bring forward an impression left by the art work, corporeally. Tolentino has discussed this: the source of the work is the artist. From the emotions of their work, audiences receive, feel, translate. That an artist is part of the artist-audience contract (a revised contract: "where audiences are made into participants" and emancipation is the chore/core), does not deny the chain of  translations that we (as writers/scholars/audience members to a work) enact in response to live performance.  True, some of us are less witty than others.   I fail at "guy walked into a bar" jokes, but still I rise.  Sometimes I need olive oil and only have corn oil.  We use what we got.  

PLEASURE NOTE

Great to meet pioneers out there making cultural space for us writers/v-log makers.   Grace MOON of Velvetpark: dyke culture in bloom is an avid art-lover and features interesting work on gender, race, and sexuality on her site. Big props to Grace Moon! She offers up a great interview with Catherine Opie on the site; you can watch it in the videos to the right as well, entitled "Catherine Opie: Guggenheim Retrospective." Opie talks about Athey's work, shows the mothering photo, Mapplethorpe, the carvings. She's in full support of complex art and complex thinking.

Here's to the geo-political and affective landscapes hailed by Athey and Tolentino's pieces: NYC, LA, UK, Berlin, the IE, and to those who dig other lesbian/queer artists and cultural workers because each work hard and give each other room to rock it, and rock it hard. 

- Tania Hammidi

"(I Am) the 29th Bather": Julie Tolentino's "The Sky Remains the Same"

"(I Am) the 29th Bather" is tattooed on the inside of her arm. We were neck deep in a mineral bath when I saw this reference to the 11th section of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself":

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore;
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly:
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank;
She hides, handsome and richly drest, aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you;
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather;
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair:
Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies;
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun -
they do not ask who seizes fast to them;
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch;
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

She told me that she has hidden lines from the poem in her performances. I imagine Whitman's words sewn into the rope that winds around her face in "Cry of Love." Or just a line or two tucked into her jacked pocket. This woman in this poem slips into someone else's waters - there is an exquisite visual geometry of the poem as the poet sees her, as we see the poet seeing her, but all of this goes on around and among "28 young men" who do not ask, do not know, and who do not think. Life seems easier for them, and is, perhaps, easier on them. "The Sky Remains the Same: Julie Tolentino Archives Ron Athey's Self-Obliteration Solo: Ecstatic" is part of a larger project in which Tolentino is developing a movement-based archive of performance, in collaboration with other artists. Tolentino's "re-performs" Self-Obliteration Solo on the spot - just after Athey completes a cycle of actions & movement (brushing, the "reveal," bleeding, sliding/slipping under the glass...). As more and more artists and curators turn to the re-performance of live art "classics" (most notable - Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces) this strikes me as a radical move. Athey spoke briefly about this in our conversation (the postcast of which is here). The programming of reperformances is an easy move - where is the risk in staging live art practices that have been fully canonized within contemporary art? What does it mean to stage reperformances in a country in which most museums and galleries stopped programming new and challenging performance art in the mid-1990s? From a lot of angles, he said, it looks like a cop out. This collaboration pushes the boundaries of re-performance by showing that such repetitions need not wait for the dust to settle - and that such conversations between artists can unfold in and of themselves in the here and now. Reperformance, here, is a way of being with each other in performance.

When our attention turns to Tolentino, we know roughly what to expect (brushing, the "reveal," bleeding, slipping/sliding under glass...). I think for some (including myself) this made the performance harder to watch - perhaps because with Athey there is a period in which you don't know that there are needles piercing his skin under the wig, but with Tolentino we know they are there from the start - and have been since the start of his performance. I don't know that I felt it differently because she is (and I am) a woman. I think that women are generally less freaked out by blood than men. Watching her move through this bloody performance I felt pulled through it in a very different way than with Athey - I felt implicated in ways I don't fully grasp, but which speak to my attraction to Whitman's poem.

As Brownell writes, Tolentino struggled with the glass plates - it took her a minute to wrestle them apart so that she could pull and slip them up and across her body. She seemed drained by the end of the performance. At the end of the performance, when Athey threw his arms up in a kind of athletic joy and a couple of us thought that Tolentino was less ecstatic, and more exhausted. I don't know if this was true for her.

(I Am) the 29th Bather: The way she has written that on her body is telling. The identification is parenthetical - the claim is covert, slipped into the unofficial title of the poem. She is there and she is not. She is and is not. I see you, Whitman writes, as of course this is us - I am there, thinking "I see you," I see you wrestling with the glass, wrestling with this performance that is and is not yours.

Her performance acts as an immediate response to Athey's - it archives it in movement as we do in conversation. It also expands Athey's "Solo" into collaboration - into a co-authored solo event. It added a watery depth to Self-Obliteration Solo which I am still sounding.

History in the Red Bricks

This contribution is a comment on the two nights of YOU BELONG TO ME performances regarding urban development and the place of radical queer performance. It could be my degree in Community Development that is showing, or maybe -- in the spirit of artists James Luna and Julie Tolentino's works -- I am responding to an archival drive. I think both.

There's much talk about the development of downtown Riverside, of late. Several of the restaurants are closing shop due to the economy and class relations, but beyond that there's forever been a dead nightlife with only little slivers of success for the entrepeneurs who give it a go. I shalln't open up all the cans of worms.

You know what I'm talking about. Finding space to do radical queer work outside of local bars or clubs is about as easy as getting a deeply-lodged splinter out of your finger with one hand -- and no femmes in sight. Rosalyn Deutsche talks a lot about the impact of a whiteness as a class and property-ownernship minded mentality in its production of late 21st century capitalism in her book, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (1996). There's no bottom line to the book -- it is brimming with gold. But appropriate to my comments about the impact of Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey's presence in the Inland Empire, I offer this up: "Democracy and its corollary, public space, are brought into existence when the idea that the social is founded on a substantial base, a positivity, is abandoned" (274). Essentially, if one were to ask why queer and trans durational work needs to be in Riverside in additional to GLB cultural events, I would tell you this is the reason: we need a deep soak out here in artistic practices that are themselves deeply immersed in theoretical knowledge about the production of (alternative, resistant) spaces. Queer still seems to queer, as in the verb. More on that below.

With over 140 attendees on each night and such a vast array of ages, proclivities, ethnic, sexual and aesthetic orientations in the room, I can report only for myself that the two nights of performance at 6th/Main Street (the old jazz club) were fantastically surprising. Not the kind of surprising where you jump in your shoes (though I did that), but a grounding one (like after yoga or a good jog). I could not help but notice how vibrant Riverside was when left in the right hands, and how the night did seem alive with ebbs and flows of a downtown life whose interests could catapult a renaissance – for real – from there. Queer performance artists have a way of not only putting on a representational moment through the ‘event’ of their official performance time slot, but they also restructure social relationships and open up new possibilities for engagement, critical thought, and the exchange of (visual and performative) ideas about pleasure and queer survival. This is what Deutsche points to in the excerpt that I pulled above. Tolentino, Athey, and all the artists + programmers know -- and bear the responsibility in that knowledge-- that they are creating social space ... that it is not a given. In short, queer survival is on the line. That is never to be taken lightly – and I believe none of those who attended the "You Belong To Me" nights of performance at the old jazz club nor who performed in or worked the night for a second took their eyes off of that reality. Rather than a design of commerical entertainment, queer durational work attendant to alternative histories and corpo-realities has a deeper goal.

If my slip is showing, it’s because I have an opinion and a practice related to queer survival in the public sphere through performance/art. While the struggle to get through is part of the journey, I also want what many queer artists and thinkers want – a place that feels like home, a place that shares more than scraps, and a place that is, in fact, glorious. That is no easy matter in mainstream America when it comes to the use of public space. Yet, I come from a town that took out a city street to extend the size of the local park as a response to how residents of all kinds wanted to use its geography; I have been spoiled with possibility.

Translating that to the the old jazz club, I wanted to know: would the event meet the demands of the space? Would the room filled be filled with all that it could be – ideas, people, health, welfare, intermingling, focus, challenge, and a politics worth emulating in the names of the minority folk invoked (queer, feminist, trans, African American, Asian American, Native American, Latino/a, Arab American, hip hop, punk, and homeless)? As the building held us in, would we fulfill our part of the bargin to hold its histories in, in one way or another? These were some thoughts in approaching the weekend.

During the week of the YOU BELONG TO ME workshop/seminar and performances, the city of Riverside (or its hired hand) continued to demolish downtown Riverside’s Chinatown history. That's plain old racism/classism in the guise of urban development. On Monday night, I took a walk from 6th and Main towards University Ave., straddling the overturned soil and ‘caution’ yellow plastic tape over the current construction in the mall, alerting pedestrians not to tred. The "city of arts" reconstruction there, distracts from the demolition just a few blocks down, on Brockton. That is the way history goes . . . . throw up some fanfare while the rest of us live in our bodies with the histories we know are being leveled or cemented -- literally -- into the ground. There are names to indicate these histories, Oaxacalifornia, the East side, Riverbottom, Box Springs, and more.

I had the pleasure of meeting the former owner of the old jazz club, Mary Williams, when she stopped in on Friday night while James Luna and Ursula Rucker were singing. Mary Williams and her husband come from a long line of African American entrepeneurs in the city of Riverside, which includes Darren Conkerite, the owner of Back To The Grind cafe (host of the 4-day workshop/seminar). I am fond of predecessors -- they know how a space works; if treated with respect, they can be willing and excited to share their errs and successes. From a feminist position, I also felt moved to overtly recognize Williams -- to let her know I knew she had labored hard to keep souls alive in Riverside .. or, more specifically, that I had been moved by her work. So, I pursued a moment with Mary and her friends. We crossed the bridge of strangers and met in the middle, shared a second. The music was audible and, more importantly, could be felt down the pedestrian mall corridor, pulsing through the jazz club windows. Perhaps that is what drew she and her friends -- who knows. To me, with the gorgeous lighting Jennifer Doyle, Shane Shukis, Julie Tolentino, and crew Abigail Severance, Steakhouse, and Pig Pen set up, that red brick building shone from far down the block. A phrase from Frederick Jameson comes to mind here. Jameson says that "without laughter, speech is a dead language." From Jameson I come to know that any event staged in an ‘old’ building participates in the question of how to reach from the present into and through the past – calling up and culling up the successes, failures, surprises, and reliefs of the architectural space as a potential, living breathing language. I heard chortles that night, amongst the blood and brick. Too, Doyle and Athey talked about the camp figure that haunted his performance in their art talk earlier that day, another kind of laughter audible against the brick.

Williams' curiosity at what had become of her old digs spoke -- to me -- of the larger thing that connected us: the giant red brick casing that was brought to life -- and, in exchange, gave life -- to the stories Ron, Julie, James, Ursula, Heather, and Zachary brought with them to share with us. Which gets me to my main point. Like Williams, (many) queer performance artists wedded to the corporeal as their medium are synched in a specific way to buildings, to space. It is part of the discussion.

With the big push to make Riverside "the city of arts," do city officials know that they need the kind of radical queer performance we saw over the weekend to achieve their goal? To really give the town life? Sylvester, open up your ghostly voice and sing it out, right about here. The notion that ‘gays sparkle up the place’ is best landed in a complex tapestry of racial histories and sexed, class relations. Beyond the wish for urban gentrification that this statement makes -- which is barking up the totally wrong tree; I'm not here to make someone else a nice place to colonize -- there is a core element of truth to the impact queers and gender-variants (in connection with mainstream "GLBTIAQ" identity discourse, but different from that discourse) make in keeping a town deeply meaningful. This gets lost on a general public. So I am going to explain it for a second.

All of the pieces confronted the fantasy that there was anything but labor involved in making survival glamorous. From Zachary Drucker’s hot aqua bikini to the dark suits of Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey’s danced duet, to the outfits in the crowd, it was, after all, an incredibly glamorous night. More importantly, it is the choreography of a space open to bois, femmes, to grrls, to activists, to punks, to sharp feminists that queer culture, to youth, to the homeless man who showed a few of us where he liked to sit, that gives that glamour its ferocity. The devastatingly beautiful contribution each artist made to stage their knowledge about the power of the corporeal is a missing link in sub-urban and rural design. I know I haven't quite made all the connections I need to in this entry to make that crystal clear, but there it is: my point.

I am no native to the Riv., but like many who have lived in the I.E., I find myself returning to it, more often than I intend. Finally, the town glistens for me, due in no small part to Doyle and Shukis’ tremendous efforts in bringing this durational and queer performance art to home turf. And beyond measure, I carry that little sparkle due to the rock star artists Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Ursula Rucker, James Luna, and Praxis wonders Heather Cassils and Zachary Drucker.

Will life go back to what it was prior to this weekend’s performances: Tolentino's "Untitled," Athey’s "SELF-OBLITERATION Solo #1: Ecstatic," Tolentino's "CRY OF LOVE" (2009), Tolentino's archive of Ron Athey's piece, "THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME: Tolentino Archives Athey's SELF-OBLITERATION Solo #1: Ecstatic," Cassils’ "Hard Times," Drucker’s "The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See," Rucker’s poetry+voice, and Luna’s sonic stories? Bah. The game is well underway, and returning always builds on what we hold in our bodies.

Ron Athey's Self-Obliteration Solo #1: Ecstatic

Ron Athey's work should be seen as episodic - meaning, each performance belongs to a larger sequence of performance. This is true in several ways. Each performance of Self-Obliteration Solo #1: Ecstatic revises a previous performance, and so, as long as he performs this work, our notion of the work can expand to include each of its iterations.

But also, individual performances grow from previous work - often quite directly. Incorruptible Flesh expanded ten years after its first iteration with Lawrence Steger when Athey developed Incorruptible Flesh: Disassociated Sparkle around its final image and also Incorruptible Flesh: The Perpetual Wound, his recent collaboration with Dominic Johnson (from which the above photo by Regis Hertich was taken). The performance I describe here is part of these performative "threads". Of course, Self-Obliteration Solo #1 is more than enough to contemplate in and of itself.

After Zackary Drucker's piece, the audience instinctively turned to the back room and collected around the platforms. We were given an intermission, which we needed in order to catch our collective breath.

Athey and Tolentino came into the space and climbed on top of the two platforms, which were about eye-level - high enough to give everyone a good sight line, and high enough, too, to feel like more than "stage" and somehow more like "altar". They positioned themselves on their hands and knees. Both were naked but for identical wigs of very long and straight blond hair. (All four artists, in fact, performed in blond wigs.) As the lights came up on Athey, he took a brush in his hand and began to comb the long blond hair which cascaded down over his face and to the surface of the platform. The brush hit the platform's surface hard with each stroke, and the brushing seemed to get increasingly violent as he went on. He then sat backs on his heals to backcomb and teasing the hair into a fright wig.

It was at this point we encountered the performance's "reveal": Athey took the wig off by removing needles which appeared to hold them in place. Nothing odd there, as wigs are normally pinned to the wearer's hair. But of course, he has no hair - these surgical needles pierced the skin on his head. It was at this point the audience realized that there's been a hidden level of violence to the brushing and combing of the wig.
Let me pause here to gesture towards at least two "texts" as points of reference for this first stage of the performance.

While I don't think Athey was in direct conversation with it - those of us who know performance video can't help but think of the artist Marina Abramovic's Art Must Be Beautiful, The Artist Must Be Beautiful (1975) as one context for this part of the performance. In that performance video, Abramovic violently brushes her hair, all the while saying "Art Must Be Beautiful, The Artist Must Be Beautiful." The reference is even more relevant if you listen to Abramovic's commentary about the performance video (click here the mp3 is part of an installation shot of MOCA Los Angeles's WACK! exhibit). She explains that this work was imagined as an intervention against the idea that art must beautiful:

Art should be much more than beautiful. Art should ask tough questions. Art should predict the future. Art should elevate the spirit of the spectator. Performance is one of the most direct forms for energy transmission to the audience.

The literal source "image" for Athey's performance is actually Marlene Dietrich - who used all sorts of old-school cosmetic and tricks to create her look, including (apparently), "gruesome mini-facelifts (achieved by weaving her hair into tight braids, pinning them tightly to her scalp with surgical needles, and then topping it all with sexy wigs)." (That quote is from a UK site about her grave.)

As you might imagine, with the wig off and blood dripping from head, the tone of the performance shifts. Athey's work often works the weird spaces on the edge of camp, and for me (writing as a critic) the most difficult aspect of his work is exactly this kind of moment - I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or shiver. I felt caught up in very conflicting affective currents.

At this point in the performance, Athey removed the pane of glass at the foot of his "bed" and lays it flat. Taking up the "downward dog" pose, he positions his face over the glass and blood pores from the wounds in his scalp. The quantity of blood is shocking (we all bleed freely from head wounds). I was, I think, most rattled by the fact that I could smell it. (Check out my December Art21 essay on blood work & performance.) 

He moved onto his back, and dragged that pane of glass over his body. He then pulled the glass at the head of the platform up, and placed it on top of the bloodied pane and did a strange series of movements. He slid the panes of glass up and over each other. There was a lot of sound in this - the sound of his effort (you could see that was was hard to separate the glass panes as they became sticky with blood), the slap and slide of the glass.

This meaning of this series of actions is opaque - but it helps to know that the performance "The Perpetual Wound" ends with Athey and Johnson pressing open wounds on their thighs against opposite sides of a pane of glass. The glass here becomes a substitute for another body and also the thing between his body and the world.

My memory begins to fall apart here. I know that he puts the glass back in its place. I know he puts on another wig. And that combs the hair around his face (this recalls to me the image of the rope wound around Tolentino's face at the opening of Cry of Love). But I can't remember if that happened before or after Tolentino "archives" Self-Obliteration Solo: Ecstasy in her piece The Sky Remains the Same.

I am going to treat Tolentino's performance separately - because the issues it raises are complex and it should be treated as a distinct performance, although, as will be more clear in the next article I write here, the two works are intertwined both conceptually and structurally. (Tolentino repeats Athey's actions, but the two also mirror each other at the performance's conclusion.)

But I want to stick with Athey for the moment.

I saw this performance in 2008 in Krems, Austria at the annual Donau Festival (where it was performed in a "dialogue" with the above-mentioned artist/scholar Dominic Johnson - I believe the photo to the right is from that event). I saw it immediately after Ursula Rucker's concert (which was staged in a different venue). This was is a festival of experimental art, theater, and music. The space in which Athey & Johnson performed was like a black box theater, and the crowd was much bigger and more oriented towards music. The platform was a lot lower which made Athey feel more exposed to the audience than this Riverside performance which had instead the powerful extravagance of a Mayan ritual - largely thanks to the platforms' height. The Austrian space was cold, too - and too big for you to feel overwhelmed by his physical presence or by the blood.

I was really happy, in fact, with the difference between these performances - because although the Donau event was more grand and the audience much larger, this Riverside performance of Self-Obliteration Solo #1 was much grander as a performance than that earlier version, and I think the audience's experience was, too, somewhat closer to what Athey describes as the desired effect of this performance.

Athey writes about the development of this piece in an essay written for a Polish catalogue (it was performed in Warsaw in November 2008). Throughout his career, he has explicitly engaged with martyrology in his work - with the gorgeous & grotesteque sufferings of saints, with the gory erotics their their stories and symbology. This is in no small part because he was raised as an "ecstatic" by his Pentacostal family. His own mythology begins with a story of having been chosen before birth to receive gifts of the Spirit, and pivots around a rejection the homophobic and moralizing dogma of the religion, while an embrace of the ethic and mode of being of the ecstatic. One might call this his moment of conversion.

Being at one of his performances is a little like stepping inside a portrait of St. Sebastian. And it is perhaps ironic that people who've done some serious time in fundamentalist settings talking directly to god are perhaps the most equipped to "get" this side of his practice.

The section of the essay in which Athey addresses this side of his experience is wonderfully titled "The Beautification of the Pervert," and here I'd like to turn the floor over to him:

How to negotiate my expression? I want to go back into the center of those paintings, golden and gangrenous, rays and beams and arrows, and absorb the violation. Take the dead and deflated, embed lifelike glass eyes. What am I then, a physical manifestation of a psychic disease? The Ecstatic, answers “An honored epileptic.” The Sensualist merely purrs, distracted in a tracing the concave and moist. Ever defensive, the Nihilist, upholds the ‘what the fuck?’ in all instances, while a name game begins, to identify all the possible pathologies (Exhibitionist, Messianic Complex, Freudian Death Drive urge to pre-birth non-existence, full-throttle Lacanian Joissance) that all ring true. Open wounds seep, or sprinkle, or tinkle the blood, without which, the body would be waxen, the golden light over-saturated and brassy, a dis-intoxicant.

Plucked: Zackary Drucker's "The Inability To Be Looked At and The Horror Of Nothing To See"

With the conclusion of Julie Tolentino's "Cry of Love," we were ushered back into the front room where we found Zackary Drucker on his back on a massage table. Tweezers were lined up on either side of him in tidy rows.

We were directed by his voice to gather around the table. He spoke in the steady monotone of someone leading a meditation in a spa. Let me say right off the bat: I don't think my description of this piece will do it justice. When Ron Athey first told me about it, I thought it sounded somewhat clunky, possibly didactic. But it wasn't in the least. Or, rather it was didactic, but not in a way that I expected.

His voice directed our attention to his body - spread out on the table before us, he was wearing nothing but a pair of aqua blue panties and dainty slippers. We were instructed to pick up the tweezers, and work on clearing a small section of his skin of body hair. If we could not or did not want to do so, we were asked to put a hand on the back of someone in front of us - to connect ourselves to the activity.

As we plucked, the voice recited a mantra - I got preoccupied with a light which blew out and so I can't recall the exact words - but at one point, the gist of this mantra was something like the following (again, these are not his words, but rather the gist): Whatever you do, you will never be woman enough. Whatever you do, you will never be man enough. You will never be enough of whatever you are supposed to be. The words were more subtle than this, and their effect was cumulative. Like a mantra, this was repeated over and over again. And so, in the midst of a story of gender-fuck, and gendered failure, we worked collectively on his body. At a collective maitenance of his body. It was deeply moving - visually striking, too, as the whole crowd organized itself around him.

This was the one piece in the night that moved some members of the audience to tears, and I can see why. It cut very close to home for a lot of people in the room. But there was something transformative about hearing that together - and working together to refuse that. Or, working together knowing that whatever we are doing will never be enough for others - but it is enough for us.

He ended the piece by asking everyone to turn around - to turn their backs on him. By that point in the performance I'd drifted out to the back of the room to join some friends. Where at first we were looking at a crowd with their backs to us, when they were directed to turn around we suddenly found ourselves faced. It also meant that if you'd been gathered around the table, you faced now the back of the person who had been touching you. It was perfect.

Now, let me go back to something I wrote earlier about the importance of turning around, turning and facing, turning one's back to the night's choreography. I think I especially tuned into this because I'd just been teaching some critical essays on the rhetorical trope of "chiasmus" - basically, reversal. Queer scholars of literary and visual culture have long noted the importance of reversal to queer art practices - there is something unavoidably sodomitical about turning the back, and there is something liberating for some artists in what a turn of the back makes possible - reversal is just plain erotic. For the high academic turn on this see Lee Edleman's essay "Seeing Things," or D.A. Miller's brilliant essay on Hitchcock's film Rope. Or other work anthologized in the collection Reclaiming Sodom (edited by Jonathan Goldberg).

Starting with Cassils - who opened her pose with her back to us, and then very slowly rotated around to face us - every piece that night seemed to pivot and turn in ways that felt decidedly queer.

(I should note another point of intersection between their performances: her eyes were covered by gory wound make-up. His were covered by a beauty mask - both seem to want us to look at them without us seeing them see us.)

So much wonderfulness, so little time.

Hello my dear You-Belong-to-Me-ers--

Just wanted to let all y'all know that I was thrilled to participate in the seminar, thrilled with our conversations and lectures and screenings and performances, thrilled to come back the following week and experience the Resonate/Obliterate performances.  I have so much more to say, but for the time being, the construction and finessing of almost all of my words is devoted to my thesis, so for now I shall enjoy reading along, and promise to jump into the blogging fray as soon as I have a surplus of words at hand.

Cheers!

The Plenum of Proof: Julie Tolentino's "Cry of Love"

Writing and talking do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.












I sent these lines from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself to my love. We are separated by distance, and so connected by words - by the telephone, internet, skype, by intensely mediated forms of exchange. Most of the time, these lines communicate nothing except that we are thinking of each other. That is the way of love letters. It's the opposite of a telegram - a telegram jams as much information as possible into economical prose. The love letter is fundamentally "empty" - the core of its matter is how the loved one touches the paper you touched. Of course, these days, it's not paper joining us. It's a transcontinental wire, a cable snaking along the ocean's floor.

Above are three of Tracy Mostovoy's photographs of Julie Tolentino's performance "Cry of Love." Tolentino's face is wrapped in coarse rope which extends from her, across and above the audience. Stosh Fila stands discreetly behind the crowd holding the other end, and pulls. Tolentino unravels before us, rolling over, spinning, being spun. She unwinds. I imagine that the rope ends in her mouth. It is an incredibly simple image. Again I'm reminded of the surrealists, this time: Magritte - like The Lovers, pictured here.

I am thinking of that fairy tale about the two princesses, one who spits roses and diamonds when she speaks, and one who spits frogs and toads. I am thinking about how my love seems to love my talk, and doesn't seem to mind when I bore him. The talk is like a cord, a connection. Something is traveling along it besides sense. And I think of my own dreams, in which I hear my love's voice - no words that I understand, just sound - something from the mouth. (That my thoughts on this become about me reflect how personal this performance feels - not only for the artist, but for her audience.)

Unwound, let loose, you would think she would seem free. But she seems lost, misplaced. Ron Athey enters the space here (in a matching suit), and they wind around each other. (It is a pleasure to see them move together - this feels new for him.) He drags her off, cleaning up the mess. A friend.

Givens: Some thoughts on the opening images - Julie Tolentino & Heather Cassils

I am still absorbing Saturday night. But I want to record some thoughts here, before the paint dries, if you will.

I don't know how many of those who were there on Saturday got to see the "installation" in the back of the back room - What looked like a woman bent over a knocked over chair - her legs bound up with twine, or rope - her underwear pulled aside. It looked like a crime scene, or a surrealist photograph. It was strangely beautiful, and upsetting.

That body was Julie Tolentino's. (Most of the photographs of the event were taken by Tracy Mostovoy. The image below - to the left of Duchamp & Sherman - was, however, taken by E.O.) She describes this work a "study," produced in collaboration with Stosh Fila. Both the image presented, and its positioning in the back of the room, tucked away, slightly hidden - reminded me of Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donnés (1944-1966). The title means "given" - as in "a given," and is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I believe this was his last work or, at least, it was exhibited only after his death. It, too, is an installation of sorts - in order to see this image you have to look through a peephole - your curiosity is "rewarded" with the image of what looks like a nude female corpse. I think it is the "givenness" of the image that connects the two works for me - the idea that this violated body is always already there.

It seemed, too, to ask why we were all there. In an e-mail correspondence Tolentino mentioned Cindy Sherman as a point of reference - and she certainly invoked those "crime scene" images which are beautiful, abject, sexual and disturbing all at the same time. And, like Sherman, Tolentino is working with her body here. What does it mean for an artist to present herself live, in such a position?

The crowd drifted towards that back corner of the back room - sensing that this room - which held two large platforms-plympths - was where the action would be. And as we looked at this "picture" (it was a kind of tableaux vivant if you can have what looks like a violated corpse at the heart of a living picture), we were gently encouraged into the front room - where we found Heather Cassils on the bar in a V-shaped posing thong (I am not sure if that's the right terminology for what she was wearing). Her back was to us, and she was posing as would a body builder - but straining, vibrating with tension.

Tolentino's body was a beautiful corpse, a scene of sexual violence and disaster - totally still, exposed and yet hidden (we could only see her lower half, from the back).

Walking into the main room we were confronted with a different body. Where Tolentino's was low, hidden in the dark - Cassils's was high up on the bar, back lit, and glowing. It was still, in that her movement was very minimal - but the performance was very much alive - she quivered, rippled, and ripped. (This is perhaps the performance most difficult photograph - how to capture quivering in a still image??)

I don't have the word for her version of gender fuck. Androgynous does not seem quite right somehow. Maybe some of you can help me on this.

She moved carefully through a posing sequence - these movements choreographed with lighting changes which seemed to draw her outline in electricity. As she turned toward the crowd, she presented a face marred, scarred across the eyes - a mask, a mess of pink flesh and glitter (could she see anything?) It took me a while to notice that her feet were slippered in panty-hose like fabric, and that it must have been very slippery up there. I found myself anxious, nervous, and stunned by the strange simplicity of it all. She calls the piece "Hard Times." It was beautiful, and strange.

The crowd was then directed gently to the back room for Tolentino's performance "Cry of Love." I'll wait to write about this piece in a separate entry, because already there is so much to think about: The whole night felt like a conversation between the artists - something I watched Ron Athey & Julie Tolentino knit together over the weekend - and especially the latter as she also made magic with the minimalist technical set up, and orchestrated the sequence of performances in order to make the most of the space and create the right pacing. One might, in this sense, say she wrote and "scored" the evening (my colleague Jim Tobias uses this term in an expanded sense that I find really useful for talking about performance).

Pairing the "hidden" opening image with Cassils's performance was itself fascinating - two extreme presentations - "studies" to borrow Tolentino's framing - of the female body - working very differently in their resistance to, explosions/implosions of that that term "female body" might mean. I appreciated opening a night of queer performance with such strong and radically different feminist images. And the physical geometry, too - they were positioned at opposite ends of the space. Like a performative frame. We turned our backs on Julie to see Heather. That's important. Turning around, facing, turning away from - there was a lot of this kind of movement both within the performances, and in the audience. That movement served very practical purposes, allowing the artists to get into their positions while the audience's attention was directed elsewhere. That said, I've never seen an audience's movement, in fact, so perfectly integrated into the experience of a performance. It seemed to amplify each piece, make each performance feel in and of itself like a movement.

I read that as one of Julie Tolentino's signatures on the evening - a consciousness of the meaningfulness of the movement of our bodies through the performative space. More on this later.

"Review" of You Belong to Me by The One

I'm Lauren DeLand, the shouting gal from the video some posts below. What follows is the complete text of the performance I gave on Feb. 16th, the final day of the You Belong to Me performance workshop. This facetious "review" was written before any of the performances that occurred that day took actually took place. Working with the performer's early descriptions of what they thought they would present on the final day, I crafted a response by mimicing the rhetoric of conservative art criticism.

This work of fiction was informed by a number of topics we'd explored over the duration of the workshop: Ron Athey's ideas about crafting a persona through performance, Jennifer Doyle's discussion of the chain of rumor that comprised Aliza Shvarts' infamous recent work, and Matt Cornell's inquiry about whether anything existed that could constitute "right-wing performance art." In researching Ron's work, I had come across a number of conservative tirades against his performances, and I found myself actually entertained by the poised hysteria of these arguments. I came to think of such criticisms as highly crafted performances of rage. Even when the authors get the facts gratuitously wrong-- as I do in nearly every detail of the following critique-- they appear to will their words into reality through the sheer force of belief.

In deciding to take on the challenge of writing something against my own critical sensibilities, I also wanted to challenge the group's capacity for fiction with this admittedly horrible serries of distortions. Virtually nothing of what follows is true, from the details of the performances to the amount of money that went into funding their production. Yet even a brief study of the critical reception of Athey's work alone shows that I am hardly alone in this critical tradition of willful fabrication. After bringing this new critical persona into the world, I named it "The One."

If one were to enter the Back to the Grind coffee shop in downtown Riverside this week, what would one see? The upstairs lounge would be arrayed with patrons, some perhaps perusing the latest grim economic news, some studying diligently in hopes of someday emerging into an improved job market.

Yet a trip down the darkened basement stairs betrays another sight altogether. Any patron who pushes beyond the “Seminar in Progress” sign on the basement door is instantly assailed by the sight of a contorted woman with a severe hair cut, dangling wretchedly from a cradle of ropes and attempting to force the end of a plunger into her posterior.

In another corner of this newly fashioned dungeon, a fully nude man babbles incoherent snippets of what sounds like lecture notes on semiotics. This display is dignified only against the example of another grown male performer who wedges himself into a cardboard box with grotesquely deliberate childishness, giggling shrilly.

Welcome to the final production of You Belong to Me, the brainchild of UCR Professor Jennifer Doyle and of provocateur performance artist Ron Athey—the culmination of a four-day long seminar which the University of California Riverside has funded to the tune of $27,000 in taxpayer dollars. Athey is an artist who has long basked in the dubious light of his own infamy: in 1994, Athey provoked a national uproar with a Minneapolis performance in which he cut into the back of a fellow performer, exposing the audience to the blood of a man of indeterminate HIV status. Fifteen years have since past, and while Athey continues to inflict unspeakable torments on his own body in the name of “art,” one would hope that such pedantic provocations would fail to hold the public’s interest.

Unfortunately, Athey’s young pupils haven’t gotten the message. The truly devastating thing about watching the seminar participants rehearse their pseudo-Dadaist gestures—hackneyed even in Athey’s generation—is that they clearly have no concept of the American middle class whose values they so loudly condemn. The struggles and sacrifices of the American soldier are roundly mocked by a burly performer who dons military dress only to disgrace it, mewling like a kitten through a monologue on desertion.

Under Athey’s tutelage, an abomination can always be carried further, and his students prove the point in their hysterical condemnation of America’s men and women in uniform. Take the scene of a vapid dominatrix in camouflage clothing, repeatedly forcing water down the throat of an orange-clad, ersatz “prisoner.” None of these pupils have served one minute in the service of their country; this much is clear. So what peculiar projections make these students envision the Department of Homeland Security as a Sadean sex palace?

Any student of Athey’s will learn these behaviors firsthand. Athey’s paradox is by now familiar: as a bizarre plea for homosexual rights, he presents the homosexual body in all variety of agonizing and humiliating poses. Yet it seems the workshop’s co-chair, Professor Doyle, cultivates contradictions of her own: the ostensible topic of Ms. Doyle’s writing is feminism, but what emerges in the work of her protégés is man-hate. In one “duet,” a male student grovels abjectly before his “master”—a buxom female student who commands wincing obedience with her every gesture.

The work of yet another female student betrays a wholly different side of modern feminism: that which demands women submit to the debasement of casual, loveless sex. A woman with close-cropped hair and wide, confused eyes kneels on the floor, allowing the audience to gradually strip her of her clothing as she hollowly recites the details of past violations.

If the female students bear the scars of this ostensible sexual “liberation,” some of the male students do not hesitate to boast over their disproportionate gain in this arrangement. From the moment one enters the dark basement space, a hollow smacking sound greets the ears. The sickening slap of copulating bodies in the show’s sole video work queasily underscores how for the seminar participants, flesh is all too cheap.

The Greeks revered the body as the epitome of artistic beauty, a convention to which artists throughout the ages were compelled to return. It thus comes as no surprise that the seminar participants esteem the cannon of Western art as lowly as they do the flesh. Throwaway pop-culture ephemera is instead the object of the performer’s adulation, as in the case of one work in which a male student, made up to resemble some sort of bizarre starlet, minces along to a medley of tunes from Disney films and popular musical theatre, in a vicious impersonation of the feminine.

In still another piece, a woman etches a tattoo into the belly of another woman at random and without a referent, adding this idle design to an already burgeoning gallery of cartoons on her skin. It is with a note of bitter irony that one realizes this work to be the most apt representative of the seminar itself, and of the investment of the participants therein. Athey and Doyle etch an abundance of nihilistic and ultimately disposable designs on the slate of their student’s minds, all on the California taxpayer’s dollar. The pupils themselves would do well to remember the inevitable drawback of tattooing, and consider it in terms of the “knowledge” they have recently acquired: how well will this serve you in your search for a real job?

-- The One, Feb. 16, 2009

Written and performed by Lauren DeLand, Feb. 15-16, 2009

Why Was This Off Campus?

A few people have wondered why this event was off campus.

"You Belong to Me" was sponsored primarily by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. They have an "Extramural Collaborations" grant specifically designed to support Humanities programming off-campus - sponsoring events that "export" ideas and concepts developed within an academic environment into non-academic spaces. Given the explicit/challenging nature of some of the performances, some have wondered if this happened off campus because UCR was nervous about doing such a thing on campus.

To be honest, it would have been a lot easier to have staged Saturday's event in a black box theater on campus. But: access to space on campus is limited - hard to gain access to and very expensive. And, on campus we would not have had the audience that we had - plus the programming would have felt like it was "for" an academic community. Same goes for a gallery space - we might have done this at The Sweeney Gallery, but circumstances required we stage everything elsewhere: they took on their co-hosting role after their exhibition calendar was set. (If you see the show on exhibit in their main space now - Your Donations at Work - you'll see that there is no floorspace.) Anyway, figuring out the space and place of "You Belong to Me" was one of its biggest challenges - and it was the explicit challenge of the grant, which required we do as much as possible off campus. In the end I was really happy with what we came up with - people stopped by all weekend to check out what was going on, and seemed grateful to have some activity and people in the space. I look forward to the opening of the Culver Center on the other end of the pedestrian mall, and hope to see more university-generated programming that appeals to our neighbors in all their freaky Inland Empire glory.