"(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.

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.