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.)
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