Below is footage of the 4 artists who performed on the Saturday 2/21 performances
plus some audience responses. If you missed "Resontate/Obliterate I.E." - this captures some of it.
I made a longer VIDEO of the week-long series of events, and posted it at _velvetparkmagazine_ www.velvetparkmagazine.com
Full VIDEO, click HERE (7:56 min):
to the right, on the top video panel,
includes interviews with Jennifer Doyle and Shane Shukis about this event
titled "Performance Art: Athey & Tolentino"
Also, the longer version has images from the full week of art talks, evening films, the artist workshop, final performances of Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Zachary Drucker, Heather Cassils, plus the bonus interviews and clips.
If moved, comment on the video on the velvetpark site. Go to 'comments' under the story "To Live and Art in Los Angeles." April 13, 2009. (scroll down www.velvetparkmedia.com to to the stories). Two responders express eloquently how significant Ron Athey's work is. Totally worth the read - so head over to VP if you are interested. The force of their comments reflects Athey's own bravery in his work....
Enjoy!
COMMENTARY
So, Jennifer Doyle discussed in her seminar lecture during YOU BELONG about the recent work of Aliza Shvarts. She suggested that many audience members fail to take seriously their own resistances to "difficult work." She traced the paths of resistance and translation surrounding Shvarts' art project, linking public and juridical forces into an agenda of re-routing the queer desire/s of Shvarts' work into normative representations of femininity, heterosexuality, art. So, unlike Roland Barthes' notion of shutting down as boredom (a response that seems benign, but actually is not), the shutting down to Shvarts' project also seeded the active component of re-scripting (and attempting to erase) the agency of the piece, and Shvarts.
I believe I experienced this first-hand when I uploaded the full-length documentary vid. onto the web. During the course of the day of the upload as comments rolled in from readers of that site responding to Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Heather Cassil's and Zachary Drucker's work, I noticed exactly what form 'shutting down' takes. In e-conversation later, a friend suggested to me that this is how blogs work -- that blogging responses come out spit-fire and reflect the insular community that has been forming around the blog/website, no matter how global the digital reach. If that is the case, so be it. But I didn't and don't like leaving the work of some of my favorite people (the artists and theorists in the piece) to be chewed on by intolerance, so it took some time for this Buddhist to rest.
It was my pleasure to get smeared trying to strike up a conversation with the commentators about the work - let's be clear about that. There's nothing like stepping out on the line for what you like.
Here's a quick historical question: Do some lesbians think they got to their L-Word without the hard work of radical queer artists and the visibility of leather culture? Just look at the line-up of writers for the first season and dig a little deeper. Check out the Opie images in the L-Word opening sequence montage. A knife has to cut sharp before the dull one's come in to spread the butter. Remember the episode where gallery curator Bette's exhibit is being censored? Those episodes dove into some of the histories and practices of censorship in queer visual art. L-Word took it on.
DIFFICULTY
In the video interview, Doyle describes some of the reasons audiences might shut down in the presence of the work of Ron Athey. Work involving blood, nudity, engaging in sado-masochist gestures, and offering a different model of feminism than that offered in the mainstream media (Doyle writes about this in her response to Julie Tolentino's "Cry of Love") can trigger, for some, the emotional, psychic, physical, and culturally-informed intellectual brass doors shut in an instant.
What Doyle did not say in her discussion is that the 'shut down' responses to radical durational queer performance of this sort -- because of the strength of the images it produces and the depth of its charge -- is empowered with arrogance, delivered casually. It sounds obvious writing it - but call me kind, I didn't know. Power has an attitude; cultural erasure, easy; and, intelligence selective. Take the eulogy to Eve Kofsky Sedgewick today in the news. Written by a regular contributor, it is a moving testament to the intelligence and deep compassion of the writer. And the list goes on -- I am into this magazine! The discussions on the site about the oil industry and eco-cars -- to me it has a pulse on a progressive picture. So, why does this kind of progressiveness stop at radical durational performance? Doyle suggests in the video that this type of work may not be everyone's cup of tea. So be it too. No big. But, really .... why do folks get so fixated on Athey's string of pearls? Why is "difficult art" so easily dismissed and joked about in one fell swoop? If this were a piece on Carolee Sheemann, would things be different?
The discussion quickly went from trying to engage the work, to a criticism of artists, in general. There was no apologies for the dismissiveness, and no attention to the sacrifices these artists are making of their bodies. For me, certainly that is the disappointing aspect of the mis-interpretations of durational performance art. How much more obvious can it get -- that's real blood there.
True, Derrida excites. But, frankly, so too does a car engine. I use languages I know more than Latin to bring forward an impression left by the art work, corporeally. Tolentino has discussed this: the source of the work is the artist. From the emotions of their work, audiences receive, feel, translate. That an artist is part of the artist-audience contract (a revised contract: "where audiences are made into participants" and emancipation is the chore/core), does not deny the chain of translations that we (as writers/scholars/audience members to a work) enact in response to live performance. True, some of us are less witty than others. I fail at "guy walked into a bar" jokes, but still I rise. Sometimes I need olive oil and only have corn oil. We use what we got.
PLEASURE NOTE
Great to meet pioneers out there making cultural space for us writers/v-log makers. Grace MOON of Velvetpark: dyke culture in bloom is an avid art-lover and features interesting work on gender, race, and sexuality on her site. Big props to Grace Moon! She offers up a great interview with Catherine Opie on the site; you can watch it in the videos to the right as well, entitled "Catherine Opie: Guggenheim Retrospective." Opie talks about Athey's work, shows the mothering photo, Mapplethorpe, the carvings. She's in full support of complex art and complex thinking.
Here's to the geo-political and affective landscapes hailed by Athey and Tolentino's pieces: NYC, LA, UK, Berlin, the IE, and to those who dig other lesbian/queer artists and cultural workers because each work hard and give each other room to rock it, and rock it hard.
- Tania Hammidi
