"(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!