The Plenum of Proof: Julie Tolentino's "Cry of Love"

Writing and talking do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.












I sent these lines from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself to my love. We are separated by distance, and so connected by words - by the telephone, internet, skype, by intensely mediated forms of exchange. Most of the time, these lines communicate nothing except that we are thinking of each other. That is the way of love letters. It's the opposite of a telegram - a telegram jams as much information as possible into economical prose. The love letter is fundamentally "empty" - the core of its matter is how the loved one touches the paper you touched. Of course, these days, it's not paper joining us. It's a transcontinental wire, a cable snaking along the ocean's floor.

Above are three of Tracy Mostovoy's photographs of Julie Tolentino's performance "Cry of Love." Tolentino's face is wrapped in coarse rope which extends from her, across and above the audience. Stosh Fila stands discreetly behind the crowd holding the other end, and pulls. Tolentino unravels before us, rolling over, spinning, being spun. She unwinds. I imagine that the rope ends in her mouth. It is an incredibly simple image. Again I'm reminded of the surrealists, this time: Magritte - like The Lovers, pictured here.

I am thinking of that fairy tale about the two princesses, one who spits roses and diamonds when she speaks, and one who spits frogs and toads. I am thinking about how my love seems to love my talk, and doesn't seem to mind when I bore him. The talk is like a cord, a connection. Something is traveling along it besides sense. And I think of my own dreams, in which I hear my love's voice - no words that I understand, just sound - something from the mouth. (That my thoughts on this become about me reflect how personal this performance feels - not only for the artist, but for her audience.)

Unwound, let loose, you would think she would seem free. But she seems lost, misplaced. Ron Athey enters the space here (in a matching suit), and they wind around each other. (It is a pleasure to see them move together - this feels new for him.) He drags her off, cleaning up the mess. A friend.

Givens: Some thoughts on the opening images - Julie Tolentino & Heather Cassils

I am still absorbing Saturday night. But I want to record some thoughts here, before the paint dries, if you will.

I don't know how many of those who were there on Saturday got to see the "installation" in the back of the back room - What looked like a woman bent over a knocked over chair - her legs bound up with twine, or rope - her underwear pulled aside. It looked like a crime scene, or a surrealist photograph. It was strangely beautiful, and upsetting.

That body was Julie Tolentino's. (Most of the photographs of the event were taken by Tracy Mostovoy. The image below - to the left of Duchamp & Sherman - was, however, taken by E.O.) She describes this work a "study," produced in collaboration with Stosh Fila. Both the image presented, and its positioning in the back of the room, tucked away, slightly hidden - reminded me of Marcel Duchamp's Étant Donnés (1944-1966). The title means "given" - as in "a given," and is installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I believe this was his last work or, at least, it was exhibited only after his death. It, too, is an installation of sorts - in order to see this image you have to look through a peephole - your curiosity is "rewarded" with the image of what looks like a nude female corpse. I think it is the "givenness" of the image that connects the two works for me - the idea that this violated body is always already there.

It seemed, too, to ask why we were all there. In an e-mail correspondence Tolentino mentioned Cindy Sherman as a point of reference - and she certainly invoked those "crime scene" images which are beautiful, abject, sexual and disturbing all at the same time. And, like Sherman, Tolentino is working with her body here. What does it mean for an artist to present herself live, in such a position?

The crowd drifted towards that back corner of the back room - sensing that this room - which held two large platforms-plympths - was where the action would be. And as we looked at this "picture" (it was a kind of tableaux vivant if you can have what looks like a violated corpse at the heart of a living picture), we were gently encouraged into the front room - where we found Heather Cassils on the bar in a V-shaped posing thong (I am not sure if that's the right terminology for what she was wearing). Her back was to us, and she was posing as would a body builder - but straining, vibrating with tension.

Tolentino's body was a beautiful corpse, a scene of sexual violence and disaster - totally still, exposed and yet hidden (we could only see her lower half, from the back).

Walking into the main room we were confronted with a different body. Where Tolentino's was low, hidden in the dark - Cassils's was high up on the bar, back lit, and glowing. It was still, in that her movement was very minimal - but the performance was very much alive - she quivered, rippled, and ripped. (This is perhaps the performance most difficult photograph - how to capture quivering in a still image??)

I don't have the word for her version of gender fuck. Androgynous does not seem quite right somehow. Maybe some of you can help me on this.

She moved carefully through a posing sequence - these movements choreographed with lighting changes which seemed to draw her outline in electricity. As she turned toward the crowd, she presented a face marred, scarred across the eyes - a mask, a mess of pink flesh and glitter (could she see anything?) It took me a while to notice that her feet were slippered in panty-hose like fabric, and that it must have been very slippery up there. I found myself anxious, nervous, and stunned by the strange simplicity of it all. She calls the piece "Hard Times." It was beautiful, and strange.

The crowd was then directed gently to the back room for Tolentino's performance "Cry of Love." I'll wait to write about this piece in a separate entry, because already there is so much to think about: The whole night felt like a conversation between the artists - something I watched Ron Athey & Julie Tolentino knit together over the weekend - and especially the latter as she also made magic with the minimalist technical set up, and orchestrated the sequence of performances in order to make the most of the space and create the right pacing. One might, in this sense, say she wrote and "scored" the evening (my colleague Jim Tobias uses this term in an expanded sense that I find really useful for talking about performance).

Pairing the "hidden" opening image with Cassils's performance was itself fascinating - two extreme presentations - "studies" to borrow Tolentino's framing - of the female body - working very differently in their resistance to, explosions/implosions of that that term "female body" might mean. I appreciated opening a night of queer performance with such strong and radically different feminist images. And the physical geometry, too - they were positioned at opposite ends of the space. Like a performative frame. We turned our backs on Julie to see Heather. That's important. Turning around, facing, turning away from - there was a lot of this kind of movement both within the performances, and in the audience. That movement served very practical purposes, allowing the artists to get into their positions while the audience's attention was directed elsewhere. That said, I've never seen an audience's movement, in fact, so perfectly integrated into the experience of a performance. It seemed to amplify each piece, make each performance feel in and of itself like a movement.

I read that as one of Julie Tolentino's signatures on the evening - a consciousness of the meaningfulness of the movement of our bodies through the performative space. More on this later.

"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

Why Was This Off Campus?

A few people have wondered why this event was off campus.

"You Belong to Me" was sponsored primarily by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. They have an "Extramural Collaborations" grant specifically designed to support Humanities programming off-campus - sponsoring events that "export" ideas and concepts developed within an academic environment into non-academic spaces. Given the explicit/challenging nature of some of the performances, some have wondered if this happened off campus because UCR was nervous about doing such a thing on campus.

To be honest, it would have been a lot easier to have staged Saturday's event in a black box theater on campus. But: access to space on campus is limited - hard to gain access to and very expensive. And, on campus we would not have had the audience that we had - plus the programming would have felt like it was "for" an academic community. Same goes for a gallery space - we might have done this at The Sweeney Gallery, but circumstances required we stage everything elsewhere: they took on their co-hosting role after their exhibition calendar was set. (If you see the show on exhibit in their main space now - Your Donations at Work - you'll see that there is no floorspace.) Anyway, figuring out the space and place of "You Belong to Me" was one of its biggest challenges - and it was the explicit challenge of the grant, which required we do as much as possible off campus. In the end I was really happy with what we came up with - people stopped by all weekend to check out what was going on, and seemed grateful to have some activity and people in the space. I look forward to the opening of the Culver Center on the other end of the pedestrian mall, and hope to see more university-generated programming that appeals to our neighbors in all their freaky Inland Empire glory.

One perspective on the seminar

As a painter, I asked myself more than once what I hoped to get out of the four-day seminar/workshop on performance art led by Ron Athey and Jennifer Doyle.  I had been feeling a pull toward incorporating elements of performance into my art for some time but my knowledge and understanding of performance art itself was very limited.  I must admit I came to the first day of the workshop with a few common misconceptions about performance art and particularly the art of Ron Athey.  That said, I was open to learning and I was completely enthusiastic about participating.  

I was impressed with the diversity and caliber of my fellow participants.  It was clear the group was open and eager.  Ron organized the first hour or so in a way that brought us all immediately together as a group.  By sharing our personal stories, stretching our bodies and even laying hands on each other, we lost our inhibitions and felt safe to explore whatever we might need to explore over the next few days.

The first day we delved into Ron's work, some of his early inspirations, his methods and practice, the role of the audience in his work and misconceptions about his work.  There was ample opportunity for all of the participants to ask pertinent and meaningful questions and for us to "flesh" out some of the concepts and meaning in Ron's work.

I was particularly interested in and impressed with Jennifer's presentation the first afternoon.  It dealt with the "difficulty" in certain pieces of performance art, for example, Ron's work.  This work is challenging and does not always leave the viewer with a clear and easy interpretation.

The second day we shared more with Ron and with each other, really looking at our individual practices.  We broke into small groups and performed impromptu pieces.  That afternoon, Jennifer shared with us the story of Aliza Shvartz and what can happen when a piece goes viral and the media and the internet place it in the center of a fire storm.  It was enlightening and thought provoking and proved to be a catalyst for quite a bit of open discussion and debate.

The third day we worked in small groups again and performed new impromptu pieces with emphasis on sound, voice and text.  It was really valuable to see the process through the eyes of each participant and experience each performance so intimately.  Finally that day, each of us gave focused thought to an individual piece that we would present on the last day of the workshop.  We shared our "rough drafts" to the group for critique and suggestions.  It was great to have feedback from everyone but we all benefited from the advice of Ron and Jennifer. Ron gave me advice for my piece from a performance perspective and Jennifer, with her wealth of knowledge and point of view as critic, gave me insight into related pieces and literature that tied in directly to what I was doing.  

The last day was all about performance.  It was instructive and valuable to have heard the loosely conceived idea presented the day before, and then, with suggestion and critique applied, see the piece fully realized.  There were some fantastic and moving performances, even a couple of "difficult" ones.  I had never performed in any capacity prior to this workshop.  It would have been reasonable for me to feel nervous about my performance.  However, the environment was so supportive and open that I was much more interested in the experience of performing itself, rather than focusing on any anxiety I might have felt about performing.  I think my performance was well received and I was really thrilled by the experience and the feedback I got.

I am so glad I took the opportunity to participate in this extraordinary workshop  It was eye opening and educational and it has imparted me with the recognition of a corner of myself that I wasn't fully aware of before.  I have a new tool at my disposal when creating my work and expressing myself.  I am left with an eagerness to learn and experience more in the arena of performance.  I want to thank the sponsors of this seminar, my fellow participants, and most especially Ron and Jennifer for their time, openness and the effort it took to bring it all together.   

Morning After Thoughts

It is too soon to make narrative, so I'll just make a couple observations.

**

Ursula Rucker practices a form of improvisational disobediance. The term is Jayna Brown's, and was invoked by Erica Edwards in her dialogue with Rucker - while it has specific resonance in the history of Black women's performance, the term works for all of the artists who shared their work with us this weekend.

I was really moved by the conversations on Saturday - by the wisdom of each artist, and by our collective movement towards the ideas and feelings they described.

**

Michelle Raheja, speaking of the challenge of James Luna's performances here in Riverside and in Palm Desert, suggested that performacne about who we are may in some cases be a lot more difficult that performance about who we are not. Much of Luna's more satirical work is driven by the latter. This work is centered on the former.

**

This is the work of the "sub sub" - Ursula invoked this image to describe working from a space below the basement - like, not even the basement.

**

Last night - curated by Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino, with the latter also doing a lot of the wrangling required in establishing how the night would flow - was really special. Ron & Julie brought in a crew of tireless "helpers" - set builders, lighting designers, gathered from their friend circle. Last night would not have worked without them - Steak, Pig Pen, Tania. Michelle was a rock.

None of this could have been pulled off without Shane Shukis from The Sweeney Gallery. He was working through what I suspect was almost unbearable exhaustion and has been too gracious to let any of us see that. (And we still have stuff to do today.) He's had a hand in everything - from securing the venue, to publicity, to getting chairs and building the platforms.

**

Ron, Julie, Heather Cassils and Zackary Drucker moved us through a tight series of tableux - it's the not the kind of night you can sum up in a snappy sentence - but it was both intimate & fierce. The crowd was unbelievable - really supportive, interested, and there.

**

The time after such a performance is strange. Ursula said that the moment you finish, when you are still on stage but the performance is over, is when you are most naked. I am sure that it is when the artist can also feel most alone.

"We mean it": Ursula Rucker & James Luna Friday 2/20!

You Belong to Me was inspired by the following quote about the beauty of performance artists, from Guillermo Gómez-Peña's manifesto "In Defense of Performance Art":

XVI.-PHYSICAL BEAUTY
We are no more or less beautiful or fit than anyone else, but neither are we average looking. Actors, dancers, and models are better looking, sportsmen and martial artists are in much better shape, and porn stars are definitely sexier. In fact, our bodies and faces tend to be awkward looking; but we have an intense look, a deranged essence of presence, an ethical quality to our features and hands. And this makes us both trustworthy to outlaws and rebels, and highly suspicious to authority. When people look into our eyes, they can tell right away— we mean it. This, I may say, amounts to a different kind of beauty.

I've always loved this paragraph and I think it describes the bill this weekend perfectly.

This video clip is for my students - we've been talking about black feminist resistance against forms of oppression & the weight of history. Ursula Rucker's Supa Sista digs into just that. Come downtown tomorrow night (8:00pm @ corner of 6th & main) and check her out! Opening (!) is performance art star James Luna - you can get a taste of his bluesy persona by listening to the track on his home page.

Lauren Deland's famous last words

With not a pulse missed, Lauren Deland delivered a satiric performance of far right art criticism, read from a spot out of view. Her voice boomed into the basement with mid-Western sharpness, offering in reporter-style rhetoric a description of the final performances of the 4-day "You Belong To Me" workshop. In the beats between the words, one could grasp both her fierceness, and the accuracy of that queer art history. She has us laughing non-stop.


"How will this serve you in your search for a real job?"
-Lauren Deland, Feb 16, 2009

Tania Hammidi, the fixer

Tania, upside down in the ladies room at Back to the Grind: a performance with a plunger in the ladies room - a series of movements that d/evolve from fixing, to fixing her self to the wall, to flipping herself upside down.

Nathan Bockelman, off his head

A photo from one of the student performances on Monday - a series of low-fi boyish actions, using a cardboard box, motorcycle helmet, and hoodie.

From Performance Art to Figure Skating

Ron showed the seminar some clips of Raimund Hoghe's work over the weekend.  I've been lucky enough to see him perform twice at a dance festival - most recently, I saw his company perform a meditation on Bolero (in which they performed to the song over and over again).
The performance explicitly revisits Torvill & Dean's performance at the 1984 Olympics (and uses the television broadcast as its soundtrack).  It's pretty amazing - and strange to see that Olympic spectacle absorbed into performance art. I also saw him perform "Meinwärts" couple years ago, and watched the audience turn on him.  That performance was so slow, so serious, so painfully sincere and labored that I fell asleep.  I figured that was OK, and he probably wouldn't mind.  He didn't seem to care what people in the audience felt - even when some queen a couple seats away from me started heckling.  It was incredible - the hostility provoked by what I think the audience experienced as a kind of aggressive sincerity.  

The Literal Body

Jane Blocker, in What the Body Costs, points out the particular way that feminist and queer artists who work with the body (with the artist's body) often find their work read literally - in ways that violently reduce the meaning of the work, if not actively misrepresent the nature of the work itself.  This sort of phenomenon is particularly intense when it comes to work that is sexually explicit.  Ironically, in a culture which sets up sex as the ultimate destination of the story  - as a singular truth, the big "secret" that explains everything about us - when the sexual act or sexual body appear before us, we shut down.  We see "sex" - and little else. And so, works with sex at their center are often handled as if they were the same - when, in fact, such work can have as little in common with each other as, say, two paintings which take city life, or "nature", or portraiture as their subject.  This has come up a few times in our discussions in the past few days - and is raised, too, by many of the performance videos and experimental works we've been looking at.  

More later - the above is actually leftover from yesterday.  Today students presented performance pieces - a really wide range of types of work, and all very interesting.  The day flew by!  

Basement Valentine

The past two days have been really thought provoking - especially watching Ron and the seminar students work together in and through a vocabulary so different than that which I use in my own teaching. It has been a pleasure to present my recent work with the seminar participants (who are mostly artists and creative professionals), with my colleagues and students - and seeing this group mingling together in the basement of Back to the Grind.

The discussion today - about sex, the body, and performance politics - was superb - really genuine as people staked out really different perspectives, and made key interventions to push discussion further.

The film program was intentionally provocative - I wanted to give the night an emotional arc, and not an easy one tonight. I suppose I wanted to work against the easy sentimentality of Valentine's Day. So, I started with an early work by James Luna, History of the Luiseño People (1993), in which the artist sits alone at home, smoking and drinking, and making phone calls on Christmas Day to friends and family from whom he is alienated, or estranged. I also showed Suzanne Lacy's Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976) - a hilarious feminist classic which is much funnier than it sounds. The first "act" ended with Johanna Went's jaw dropping 1984 performance "Knife Boxing." I'd never seen this - my god, it has everything! Giant tampons pulled from a giant vagina. Naked dolls, the Statue of Liberty. A lamb-head. Went screams and shouts throughout to a beating drums and a dissonant sax. It's noise for the ear and eye, and absolutely amazing. Act 2 was more tough - two shorts by Chloe Piene, a short film by David Wojanarowicz, a fifteen minute visual essay on Hermann Nitsch, a performance video by Franko B ("I Miss You") and finally, Linda Montano's deeply moving, terrifyingly real "The Death of Mitchell", in which she recites the story of learning of her ex-husband's death in a monotonous chant. On the screen we see her face, covered in acupuncture needles. It's a hard piece, and deeply moving. (My Valentine's card to the class seems to say - Love is Hard.) As a few students in the seminar expressed interest in the line between spoken word, "reading", and performing, I thought this would give us all something to consider.

In some strange expression of worlds colliding (see my other blog) - there seems to be a giant American Youth Soccer Organization regional tournament here this weekend. The hotel is crawling with kids in their kits. I am trying to stay away from the hotel bar, where I'm sure I'd find the refs.

Primary Scenes

Day One:  Well, I am just about too tired to produce narrative.  Ron opened the seminar by asking students to cat-walk and introduce themselves & their performance personas.  It was great to discover who was ready to S-T-R-U-T!  I'm really impressed by this group.

Ron kept them going in conversation through the morning, then I gave a talk from my work in progress on difficulty & performance.  People seemed game, in general, for thinking, talking, and looking at art.  We watched a few works this evening - some Bas Jan Ader performance videos, the hilariously nutty "Hey, Baby Chickey" (Nina Sobell, 1978), Linda Montano's Primal Scene (1980) - which layers a film of a woman birthing to the soundtrack of Montano reading porn, Carolee Schneemann's Fuses (1963) - which is so beautiful, even in VHS.  If you can program the film - do.  It is totally worth it.  I felt really moved by it this time - I hadn't seen it in about 15 years.  And then, George Kuchar's Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) - a camp classic.  I'd originally planned to show a couple other pieces, but their mood was too dark - I decided to call it a night, and end of the weird upswing of Kuchar's DIY melodrama.  Tomorrow's program will probably be a little harder.  But still fun & provocative!

It's Thursday, Feb 12 - I can't believe the seminar is finally happening! I have wanted to see a seminar like this at UCR since I first saw the syllabus that Ron created for the course he taught at UCLA a few years back.  I still think that was one of the most well thought out, and totally rigirous explorations of performance I've ever seen.  

This is, of course, different.  A quasi-open seminar, a free class for artists and a few fellow travellers - run out of the basement of a local coffee house but on the UC's dime. The funding for this project comes largely from the University of California's Humanities Research Institute, which has a fairly new program supporting efforts to program events generated by humanist scholarship - but to do this programing off campus, in collaboration with non academic organizations.  This was perfect for my interest in very unruly art & performance - and for what art can do outside of the official spaces of art & education.  I can't shed that institutional stuff entirely here, but I'm really happy to do something in spaces that people in Riverside associate with the social, rather than with work or school.

And, I'm excited about exploring what a seminar is when it isn't taken by students! Meaning - no grades, no fees, not much by way of red tape (at least from the seminar participants' end!).  Ron knows this experience better than I do - he's taught artists workshops of varying sorts for a while -  most recently Praxis Mojave (I think that's what they called it) with Julie Tolentino - a performance "boot camp" in the desert, in the middle of August.  By all accounts it was an intense and transformative experience.  Heather Cassils & Zachary Drucker - who were a part of that workshop - will perform on Saturday 2/21 with Ron and Julie.

Anyway - not much to report today - except that wading through the library's collection of feminist performance video was oodles of fun.  I can't wait to show Linda Montano's insane "Primal Scenes" and her moving "Mitchell's Death" in the seminar this weekend.  Montano is a provocative and moving artist - see this interview about the piece she did with Tehching Hseih (in which they lived tied together by rope for a year).  There is a good overview of her performance videos on Video Data Bank.

Funny how, in 2009, checking out a half dozen tapes will make you feel like you are handling ancient materials.

Prelude to the Beginning!

Well, even though I have too much on my plate, I thought I'd keep a blog through the next two weeks. Why not record my thoughts, and invite yours.

Ron just got back from Berlin, and his head is still spinning from a whirlwind trip of performance, and meetings preparing for his upcoming turn directing the Cheap Collective and their production "Cheap Daddy" (click here for Vaginal Davis's turn in Cheap Blackie.) He gave a provocative, perhaps jetlag induced hallucinatory artists talk at UCR yesterday - to students who seemed a little stunned at first, and then full of questions. I've never seen so many people ask about his involvement with the deathrock band Christian Death! Gotta love the IE, for getting right to the heart of the matter.

Ron's work extends the energy and the spirit of the spaces of defiance I remember from back then - the late 70s, the 80s. When it seemed like everyone was in a band, making art, making noise, and making a spectacle of themselves. I think folks in the I.E. are more tapped into that vibe than are folks swimming in more official art waters.

With that - below is a youtube photo montage set to a Premature Ejaculation (Athey's collaboration with CD's Roz Williams) track. Listening to it now, I think "this is DARK". And then I think, "You know, I listened a lot of this kind of thing when I was about 20, and soaked in misery." It helped. Ron mentioned in his talk last night that he thinks of his work in terms of healing - but not healing as not a gentle process - more a painful working through, a burning, a wringing out. This makes a lot of sense to me especially when I think about what deathrock, punk, and noise meant to me back then.

Program: Part One

Seminar on performance led by Ron Athey & Jennifer Doyle
16 area artists spend 4 days with Athey and Doyle, who share their archives and work as artist and critic respectively – parts of the seminar will be open to the public:

Public Lectures by Jennifer Doyle
(author of Sex Objects: Art & the Dialectics of Desire)

“Critical Limits: Difficulty and Contemporary Art”
Friday Feb. 13 2:00pm-4:30pm 2212 Humanities Building, UC Riverside
What happens when we encounter our limits as critics, as spectators – and why should we spend time unpacking them? Doyle models a new approach to the subject of difficulty and visual art via a parallel reading of the challenges posed by Thomas Eakins’s painting The Gross Clinic and Ron Athey’s recent performance, Incorruptible Flesh: Disassociated Sparkle.

“My Bloody Valentine:
When Sex & Performance Meet and Queer & Liberal Feminism Part”
Saturday Feb. 14, 2:00pm-4:30pm downstairs at Back to the Grind (3575 University Ave)
In the spring of 2008, the artist Aliza Shvarts found herself in the middle of a national controversy about a conceptual performance that engages with the possibilities of abortion. This talk maps the nature of that controversy, and asks a) why this work was so controversial, b) where feminism stands regarding abortion and art, and c) why, with all its talk about “reproductive futurism” queer theory has been relatively silent about abortion.

Evening salon-style screenings of performance video & experimental film
curated by Athey & Doyle
Downstairs at Back to the Grind (3575 University Ave)!
5:30pm-7:30pm Friday Feb 13 & Saturday Feb 14.

Join us for an eclectic program of performance “classics” and oddball cinematic texts representing Athey’s performance & filmic archive. Expect lots of nudity, explicitness, and creepy investigations of art & intimacy. Intended to be a relaxed and social gathering - discussion and talking back to the screen encouraged

Ron Athey began making performance art in small galleries in a collaboration called Premature Ejaculation with Rozz Williams (1981). In 1992, after years of performing in nightclubs, his first theatrical performance, Martyrs and Saints, was shown at LACE gallery in Los Angeles. Since then, his work has toured festivals and art centers in the UK, Europe and Mexico. With Vaginal Davis he curated the Platinum Oasis Outfest live art extravaganza at the Coral Sands Motel (2001-2) and Visions of Excess (2003) at a lap dance club in Birmingham, England. In recent years he has staged performances at (for example) the Redcat Theater (Judas Cradle, with Julianna Snapper), The Chelsea Theater in London, and at the Politics of Ecstasy Theater festival in Berlin.

Associate Professor Jennifer Doyle is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2007 Lambda Award finalist, & Honorable Mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize). She has published a range of essays about contemporary art and performance engaging the work of such artists as Tracey Emin, Andy Warhol, Vaginal Davis, David Wojnarowicz. She writes occasional essays and reviews for Frieze magazine, and also writes a feminist blog about the cultural politics of soccer (From A Left Wing). In 2007-2008, she was in a Leverhulme Fellow in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London – the work presented here grows out of her work on Critical Limits, a book about difficulty and the politics of emotion.