Monday, March 16, 2009

"(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.

2 comments:

  1. Great post. I'm so glad that so many of the events were commented on. I definitely noticed that she seemed drained and exhausted by the end, but that makes sense considering she did three performances instead of one; in some sense she had greater perseverance than any other. Is anyone up for another post or two on Ursula Rucker or the follow-up conversations with Raheja, Doyle, and Edwards?

    Crystal Son Brownell

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  2. to be posted ... or a supplement

    "notes toward a 'queer politics of aesthetics' and/as an 'erotic ethics'"

    … two naked bodies, at fist sitting up and then on all fours, “face” each other and perform, or, act, as it were, each other (but with molecular differences and slight delays: indeed, diffèrance). It is as if a string was attached to both bodies, and thus if one body moved its arm, then the other would (have to) do the same. These bodies (reciprocal bodies? no doubt volatile bodies!) in this performance, titled (in two) Self-Obliterate #1: Ecstatic and The Sky Remains the Same (2009), highlights that there are ties that bind us (whether we like it or not, and here, a bit too soon, I am surfacing a certain ethics—an ethical bond[-ing]—one may say an “erotic ethics”). And, these ties have the power to un-tie (un-do) us, as too the performance artists—completely. These bodies on display also don long, blond wigs, which the two respective bodies fiercely brush and tease: grooming gone mad, wild, frantic. So, two naked bodies—one “male” and the other “female”—are both in drag. I mean both bodies exaggerate gender with (and without) the wigs.

    As the brushing of their wigs continues, blood begins to trickle down their scalps—like so many tears, but from the “wrong” ducts—and it mixes with the sweat from their foreheads. (I wonder: “Are these wigs stapled on? pinned on? What is causing the blood? How painful is this? Why do I feel the pain of the prick?” I am left without any answers, of course). In this space of the two bodies, I too become bound to them—as well as with the others in the room. We—I mean, this temporary “community” of “spectators”—are all twisted together and captivated. Indeed, these two bodies in this room that is a place “becoming space” for bodies “un-becoming”—or, what Deleuze and Guattari would call, “bodies without organs” (BwO), which is to say bodies that refuse and resist the proper (re-)presentation and conduct of a body within the social, and these two bodies deterritorialize the place-cum-space for “queer”.

    This performance with these bodies have been burned into my retina and mind because, and this only one reason, they are exemplary of so many bodies throughout history that refuse the body as the temple of God: we are, in the words of Artuad, “done with the judgment of God” and “we” are done with “proper bodies”—molar bodies, systematized bodies, State Bodies. And, one line of thought (of flight), which I have to think about more critically, is that this performance is a living (though always already fleeting) manual of, what I call, a “queer aesthetics of existence”. Indeed, these bodies do not demand every body enact what is enacted on the “stage” that is precisely not one, but that bodies must refuse and resist the chronic and constant normalization of bodies in our current, as Deleuze has termed it, “control society”.

    To start again, and for the first time …

    I am still (then and now) looking at this performance (even as it looks at me), and I am still caught by it—as if by a thread, a string, a strand of blond hair that has forever pulled me into the disruptive power of this “un-becoming” performance that is drenched in revising Rancière a “queer politics of aesthetics”. Without a doubt, I am spellbound, enraptured by this “un-becoming” performance of bodies that shed blood, sweat, and tears and performed a displacement-reversal and a corrective where there are no (there never are) “active” and/or “passive” spectators—only (ever) “emancipated” ones. In other words, to be there, if you will, was to perform, enact a “queer politics of aesthetics” in our current “aesthetic regime”.

    Furthermore, in this “queer-sexual-space” (to draw on a term by John Ricco and which I will return, eventually), all bodies were activated/agitated (like so many molecules) into the space of a “queer aesthetic regime” that refused all binaries (be they articulated by modernist or post-modernist theorists of art, politics, ethics, aesthetics, presence, and performance). Indeed, I, as “one” body among others, was intertwined into and onto the stage—with no proscenium. I (or as Monique Wittig would write “j/e”) was pulled and ran toward an enrapturous space of flesh that was/is a “singular multiplicity”. But, perhaps, I am failing to have this performance keep, if you will, its radicality, its un-becoming/s, its utter diffèrance …

    I will start again, and for the first time …

    In Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, performance theorist and historian, Peggy Phelan states, “[w]riting about performance has been largely been dedicated to describing in exhaustive detail the mis-en-scène, the physical gestures, the voice, the score, the action of performance event.” She goes on to state, “The dedication [which the art historian and/or performance theorist and/or historian is an exemplary source of this affective drive] stems from the knowledge that the reader may not have seen the event and therefore the critic must record it. This urge to record has given rise to an odd situation in which some of the most radical and troubling art of our cultural moment has inspired some of the most conservative (and even reactionary) critical commentary. The desire to preserve and represent the performance event is a desire we should resist” (Phelan, 1997, 3). So how to write about a weekend of performances and artists’ conversations, which was curated by UC, Riverside’s professor Jennifer Doyle, titled “You Belong to Me: Art and the Ethics of Presence”. But, maybe the question to ask is “How to ‘un-write’ performance art and its aftermaths, its after-lives?” Or, maybe the question to be asked is “How to ‘allow’ the question to remain a question, which is to refuse and resist all answers?” Maybe the question to ask is “How was a world made, and in that making how was I (simultaneously) unmade?”

    The weekend, February 20-21, 2009, of which I am writing, still in a hotel room in downtown Riverside, which took place in the “heart” of the one of the most conservative regions of Southern California—if not all of California—was a critically politico-aesthetic intervention, which resonated “queer”—or, better, surfaced “queer” in and around the city and the bodies. However “defined” for critical thought on this event, I do believe that what happened (one thing among others) is what Jacques Rancière has called “a redistribution of the sensible” that disrupts (or agitates) the “common of the community”. But, I would go further than Rancière, and taking the artists’ and Doyle’s cue, and call it “a redistribution of the sensible by way of queer disruptions, twists, and turns” that necessarily deforms the common that composes the so-called “community” as an ostensible whole. In fact the weekend showed—among many things—that any community is always already full of holes—indeed, there are only ever holes in whole. And it showed, it manifested, if only temporarily, what Eve Sedgwick has written “queer” can mean: “‘Queer’ is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across—it comes from the Indo-European root –twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torque (to twist), English athwart”. Indeed, the events of the evening were “a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant.” And, within the movement, “we” did “belong to me”—if this “me” is the “singular multiplicity” of a temporary assemblage of bodies and artists—often the two being the “same” in that a life and/as a body can be an art, and to use proper names, Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey, show(ed) us, or gestured toward, a “queer aesthetics of existence” that is never far from an ethics, an erotic ethics—given aesthetics is an ethics and a politics, but I will have to come back to all of this—not to mention the other “un-becoming” performances of the night.

    I have to start again, and for the first time …

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