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.