For this submission we have watched  Lauren Barri Holstein’s Splat, Ron Athey’s Self Obliteration and Andy Warhol’s Blowjob, Empire, kiss and Mario Banana.

For my video I think I have  got elements from all of them but the main inspiration I think was Andy Warhol.

All 4 films catch my attention straight away and specially Blowjob, kiss and Mario Banana have obvious sexual references and there is a feeling of voyeurism.

The title of both Kiss and Blowjob before the film has even started  makes us want to watch. I am excited to watch and I am waiting for something else to come, probably I am waiting for some sort of climax but the the actions are the same they keep repeating the same there is no climax and I become bored and even irritated.

In Mario Banana is not the same because the film is a lot shorter and I remain excited  and intreagued by the exoticism of the character.

From Splat themain thing that I take to make my piece is performing  gender wrong in a funny way. One of my favourite parts of this performance is the use of a knife as a phallus that cuts bags of ketchup with it and makes a real mess.

From Ron Athey’s Self Obliteration I think just like in splat I just make use  of performing my gender wrong that causes uneasiness because of the explicitness.

For my performance to camera My Pleasure, 

I pretend that a banana is my own phallus.

The still image and the title on their own give a false impresion of what the performance actually is. One could think that the banana is going to be used as a dildo for my pleasure. Instead I stroke it and play with it, lubricating it just as a man would do when masturbates. I use the title  as a bit of a bait then I slow down the film to make it long and and the action changes slightly to give a bit of titillation but there is never a climax and it becomes boring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owDbFDAAwOs

 

Iconic image:Marilyn .

In this image Marlilyn performs herself as woman in the deemed correct and normal of the times.  As sexy, sweet and beautiful for the enjoyement of the men.

In My performance, Don’t miss the opportunity to recognize the inspiring work of your colleagues,

I attempt at performing my gender and non gender ‘baddly’.

As well as working from Ryan Trecatin’s A family finds entertainment ,  I was also inspired by Ron Athey’s  Self obliteration and Marina Abramovic’s Rythm .

From the Trecartin piece I liked the sound and visual effects that gave the video a dreamlike/ subcouncious stream like feel. I Also liked the juxtaposition of the  hypertheatrical with the very real ( image of the cat / characters with very exagerated make up and exagerated actions). And I liked that the caracters performed their subjects in a non normative, abject, wrong kind of way.  I tried to implement  these in my performance but appart from performing badly I think I failed in everything else.

Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai:

I find this text very dense and quite difficult so Im not sure How well I can summarise.

Ngai talks about feelings that are normally  classed as more negative  and less desirable… she refers to envy, irritation, boredom , anxiety, paranoia. This feelings are associated with the contemporary historical time and Ngai says that  these feelings do not offer any satisfaction of virtue,cathartis. They are flat feelings that have the capacity to endure  and stay for very long periods and they are considered to be negative… as oposed to the more drammatic feelings like anger, rage and fear… that come with a suddenness and imply more action and trajectory.

These ugly feelings cause an effect of repulsion and they have a tendency to promote  what  Susan Feagin calls ” Metaresponses’… because together with the feeling.. comes the feeling that one should not be feeling that way. that it is bad to feel that way and one should avoid it at all cost.

Ngai points out that this non cathartic feelings engender art brings to the fore the failure of emotional release.

Ngai explores this feelings  through literature and films from authors like Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein amongs others.

Quotes:

“These feelings can also be described as ‘ semantically’ negative, in the sense that they are saturated with socially stigmatising meanings and values or ‘ syntactically’ negative, in the sense that they are organised by trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction, by phobic ‘ strivings away from rather than ‘philic’ strivings, ‘toward’ “.

” The anti cathartic device of dilating the time in which any particular incident takes place thus accentuates the manner in which these uneventful moments mirror the general situation of obstructed agency that gives rise to all thses ugly feelings I examine, allowing them to function as political allegories…”

 

Jennifer Doyle- Hold it against me: Difficulty and emotion in contemporary art.( Chaperts 1 and 2)

In this text Doyle discusses what is it that makes it difficult to understand and cope with certain works of art that deal with emotion. In the introduction she focuses mainly on  two particular performance works : Adrian Howells’ Held and Ron Athey’s Four scenes in a Harsh life . She  also touches on Ricardo Dominguez’s Transborder immigrant too (Tit)  and  Guillermo Gomez pena’s Mapa corpo.

Doyle starts by expressing her own difficulty with dealing with Held, this is something that surprised her as she had been to many challenging performances and had been able to cope with lots of gore. However she realises that this particular performance ( a one to one experience where  the artist  explores intimacy with the public in 3 stages , starting with just talking, then holding hands and finally spooning on a bed) is too close to home. Too real and that ie precisely what makes it difficult to deal with, it is difficult for one to distance themselves from it.

Athey, Dominguez and Gomez Pena’s work  have all been controversial and Doyle notes that

‘ Emotion, specially when coupled with legible politics, appears as critically indigestible matter, a road block  to “serious criticism” ‘ (pg12)

For Doyle is important to turn away from traditional art criticism  which by labelling works like the one’s discussed in this book as Obscene, criminal, not art,  etc.. actually avoid the discussion of the issues that the particular works are trying to talk about.

Doyle compares these works to traditional music forms relationship with “Punk and Metal”. Punk and Metal music having been branded as noise.

Doyle points out that the affect that a permormance causes  can appear as ‘ an interference, as a rupture in which the viewer is thrown back onto a dissoriented self. That noise feels like the other side of art’ (pg22). She goes on to say that bringing one’s own body into one’s work causes a “noise” that confronts traditional definitions of art.

At the end of the introduction Doyle strongly expresses her view that ‘ in the space of the performance, you adjust and accomodate to what’s happening and also the flexibility of our own desire. If you can’t, you look away or you leave’.

In the 2nd chapter, Three case studies in difficulty and the problem of affect,  Doyle exposes three works of art that  in their time cause controversy by their social effect.

The works were:

• Untitled (2008) by Aliza Shvarts. This was a piece that Shvarts as an Art student at Yale university wanted to use for her final year thesis but it provoqued such a public emotional response and outrage that she was obliged to stop it and forbidden to use it in her course work. The piece was based on her inseminating herself  over 9 monthsand then taking herbal abortive mediacation at  the same point in her menstrual cycle, to miscarry.  She never had any pergnancy test so it is unknown if she was ever pregnant. Shvarts  refused to talk about her feelings at all and as Doyle points out, by doing this we don’t know if she even felt anything at all and thus we are left to do all the feeling.

 

• Portrait of Dr Samuel Gross ( The Gross Clinic) (1878) By Thomas Eakins.  The painting depicts  an operation taking place at a teaching hospital, with students around, some interested and some not, the gaping wound very obvious and clear and a woman that cannot see the wound from where she is standing but nevertheless fins the hole affair very difficult to deal with.

As Doyle notes, this painting  is not just difficult , it is about ‘difficulty and about mastering  one’s limits as a viewer.

These limits are represented as emotional and are marked as feminine in the figure  of a woman so overcome with

feeling that she turns away from the action.

Doyle points out that works like this painting  are difficult because they challenge the ‘social being’.  She brings Judith Butler’s views of the vulnerability of the body into this:

“Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue  of the social vulnerability of our bodies as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at oce assertive and  exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow  from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, , at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.

•  Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006) by Ron Athey.  In this performance  Athey lays on a kind of metal  bed made of scaffolding tubes. his eyes are permanently open by having his eyelids pulled backwards by hooks. there is someone that has the job to apply saline drops to his eyes to prevent them from drying as he cannot blink. He has  also a baseball bat inserted in his anus. The public are invited to apply vasseline to his body as if they were caring, looking after it. Doyle quotes Amelia Jones in  this text noting how in this performance  Athey breaks out of the patriarchal norms that rule gender  and show us a body that is plastic, permeable and fragile.

Doyle says about this performance and I think the other two could be included in this, that even though this is not    political in the same way as protest march, it is still ‘powerfully an act of political defience’.

Halberstam, The queer art of failure:

I have found this a difficult text with that looks at different startegies for feminism that I had never considered, like masochism. Like refusal to be.

Halberstam talks about Spivak seeing intelectuals as having they part in formein ‘the Other ‘ as the shadow of the self, as being the ones that know better than their collonised subjects. Halberstam talks about the importance of breaking the mother daughter bond as this bond is to blame for perpetuating the status quo.  She talks about acts of masochism and unseeing as a mechanism to refuse normativity.

 

How might the deployment of ‘negative affects’ in performance be a useful strategy?

How does boredom act in performance? How can it be a political affect?

How does disgust act in performance? How can it be a political affect?

How can ‘difficulty’ in performance be deployed to bring up questions around identity, intimacy, the performing body, etc.? 

  Using negative affects in performance can subvert what is considered negative. That what is considered disgusting, abject, can be turned on its head and turned into a success… as in the case of The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein’s shows Splat and How to be come a cupcake. It  Can be used  to question why is something abject or considered disgusting and through that questioning change may be possible.

Difficulty, boredom and negative affects can be used in performance to empower that which is considered negative and abject because it is not part of mainstream.

For now I am goin to atempt to answer some questions from the knowledge I have from reading Butler as I haven’t been able to do any of the readings yet and I will come back once I have managed to read them

 

How does performance interplay with normative constructions of identity?

As  Butler says  Gender is a performative construction… we become a gender through performing it is a sense….. we perform the norms that we see in the mirror of The Other.   But  in The Cyclical Cupcake, Barri Holstein referencing Ridout talks about how there is a failure in the performance on gender… I don’t understand it totally… but she says that woman ‘cannot represent every possibility of womanhood and therefore becomes just an   act on the stage that fails to represent and imitate because that what it clames to represent is unstable aswel’

What is its affective and/or political potential? • How can art/performance disrupt gender essentialism?

By performing non normative notions of gender ….. the idea of gender as binary can be challenged and opened up to other possibilities and thoughts as  Amelia Jones observes about  Ron Athey’s performances: He is losening  the[ male] body from patriarchal norms and advocates that this body is porous and permeable, that it is plastic , frail and vulnerable. ( in Doyle, Hold it agaisnt me: difficulty and emotion in contemporary art)

What is at stake in ‘performing one’s gender wrong’?

I think the answer to the above is also valid here.

 

 

FAILURE, what is it?

Looking at the online etymology dictionary: Fail comes from the old french “fallir” which means be lacking, miss, not succeed, run out, come to an end, err, make a mistake, be dying, let down, dissapoint…

From the vulgar latin “fallire”- from latin, fallere:” To trip, cause to fall” figuratively “to deceive, trick, dupe, cheat, elude; fail, be lacking or defective.”

Failure, is the contrary of success . It is something that in our society is seen as undesirable.

In Performance failure can be used to open up new avanues that could not have been foreseen if everything would have gone according to plan. And also as a tool to push the boundaries of traditional theatre.

How can it be used as a theatrical device?

Bailes says that failure allows us to entry into a different place where subversion and resistance can be tried out and examined. That by examining that which has failed to be what initialy was expected the artist can ponder upon the ‘predicament of anticlimax’ and through that learn more about the human condition…..

Bailes suggests that by using experimanting with failure as a form of representation theatre companies like “Goat’s Island” Forced Entertainment” and “Elevator repair service” have found a way to test the boundaries and problematics and limitations of the conventional theatre event.

Cormac reiterates the above statements.

I think performing badly is a way of  letting go and making some issues more accessible by making them comic, also it allows more freedom to express…. It draws attention to paradox and contradiction. It draws attention to the non normative and different.