"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