Propo

Between 1972 – 1983, I did a series of performances which involved masks, bottles, pans, uniforms, dolls, stuffed animals, etc. After the performances these objects were either left behind or they were collected and stored in suitcases and trunks to be used in future performances. In 1983, the closed suitcases and trunks containing these performance objects were stacked on a table and exhibited as sculpture. In 1991, I opened the suitcases and trunks photographing each item. The group of photographs in their entirety was titled PROPO’. – Paul McCarthy

Listen to Me

Works by Helena Almeida

Displacement

Images from the performance Displacement Jarunun Phantachat and Dujdao Vadhanapakorn.

Art Corporel

Performances by Gina Pane.

On the Ground

Performances by Ana Mendieta.

Self Obliteration

Warrior

Watch a trailer for Marina, a documentary by Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre at Nowness.

Genital Panic

Simulation

Images from Lynn Hershman Leeson's Roberta Breitmore, (1971-1978) Performance in real life, using real materials, experience and real time San Francisco, San Diego, Italy.

Besides bending reality to create ROBERTA BREITMORE, Hershman has more significantly demolished the barriers separating theater, literature, painting, photography and conceptualism. This collage technique is not unlike filmmaker Robert Altman's multiple character/multiple viewpoint treatment in nashville. Hershman rents a room, uses the mails and classified ads as they are ordinarily used. This creative demolition may be the most promising movement in the arts today
Robert Atkins, Bay Guardian, October 13, 1978

ROBERTA BREITMORE was, for 9 years a private performance of a simulated person. In an era or alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality. Roberta's first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper advertising for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure . As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction.

Forms of Documentation: artifacts, diaries, surveillance photos, ads, handwriting analysis, credit, letters, psychiatric reports.

from the artists website

Hero

This spring MOMA will present Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, a retrospective which traces the prolific career of Marina Abramović. The exhibition includes the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting. In addition, a new, original work performed by Abramović will mark the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. All performances, one of which involves viewer participation, will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes, to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present will be on view March 14–May 31, 2010

Sadness

Blood Work

In 1985, the artist Ana Mendieta fell naked, thirty-four floors, from the window of her apartment in New York City. The only person with her at the time was her husband of only eight months, the renowned sculptor and art world celebrity, Carle Andre. Was her fall an accident, suicide or murder? ‘BloodWork’ is a cinematic exploration of the psyche of the artist, the creation of her unique and seminal Art, and the mysterious and controversial circumstances of her untimely death. ‘BloodWork’ combines interviews with scholars, Mendieta’s friends, peers and meticulous recreations of thirty of her most important Art works. Its central themes are mortality, the desire to leave a trace of one’s ephemeral existence and macabre images depicting violent crime scenes, including graphic images of rape and female victimization. Did her works foreshadow her demise? ‘BloodWork’ explores the connections between life, art and interpretations of the truth.

Blood Work synopsis from Director Richard More's website.

The Horror of Nothing to See

Holbein's originality, then, lies in this vision of Christly death that is devoid of pathos and is intimate on account of its very banality. Humanization thus reached its highest point: the point at which glory is obliterated through the image. When the dismal brushes against the nondescript, the most disturbing sign is the most ordinary one.  

-Julia Kristeva, Holbein's Dead Christ 

Last weekend, Steve Turner Contemporary presented Zackary Drucker's performance,  The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See.  Drucker, dressed only in white panties, laid prone  atop a cold steel table like a corpse prepared for dissection.  Her mouth was blocked by a silver ball, as if she were filled up with the glamour of death. She offered her hybrid body, as an idealized Christ who contained both male and female in an organic mutuality. 

Viewers were directed, by a disembodied voice, through a series of breathing exercises, new-age visions, and dysphoric confessions, all the while being instructed to pluck out the hair from the androgynous body of the artist. The often satirical voice directed the viewers to manifest their own fears and anger into the action of hair removal, as Drucker took on the emotional suffering of the audience through her own physical pain. She did not flinch or cry out, her suffering was silent. At one point the voice directed the audience to chant that "despite all efforts to become a woman, she will be doomed to a life as a man," reiterating a psychic and physical pain akin to spiritual damnation. 

While live art is always riveting, what is remarkable about Drucker's performance is her ability to decenter gender identity through mundane ritual. She does not present an erotic or monstrous body, rather she enacts a vulnerable being who embodies death. She reveals the transgender body as a natural body, a mortal body like all the other bodies in the room. Drucker's body transformed into a connective tissue, and became a mirror for the audience to reflect upon their own existential afflictions.

From the gallery press release: 

Zackary Drucker is a limp-wristed, switch queen/Los Angeles-based artist. Infusing elements of installation, performance, text, photography, and video, Drucker's work explores under-recognized aspects of queer history while simultaneously inscribing her own experience and position within it. Drucker reactivates Bruce Rodgers’ The Queens’ Vernacular, documents relationships and secret legacies, and challenges conventions of entertainment and drag performance, as well as existing art-historical representations of queer people. Oscillating between documentary, mythology, and personal narrative, the work is an exploration of gender as it is constructed, deconstructed, and experienced.

Drucker's exhibition, The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See will be on view at Steve Turner Contemporary June 6 - July 2, 2009, opening reception June 6, 6-8pm

Dirt Eater

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This is me. Be careful., performance, 2007

The costumes and props that I create (what I call supernatural conductors) involve antiquated things that were used in former eras, especially by women: objects that revolt against former utilitarian and decorative expectations and take on new hybrid roles in the context of the work. I am trying on innumerable roles and personas and "haunting" a place or space with those characters within paintings and performances. The process involves camouflaging my body; merging with or dissolving into a place or space- perhaps becoming more like an animal or plant, as a way of intercepting lost power and destabilizing static notions of the female body and the natural realm.

- from Shana Robbins artist statement

Becoming a Tree, 10" x 13", collage, ink and dirt on paper, 2007

Dirt Eater, 10" x 13", collage, ink, and dirt on paper, 2007

I'll be your mirror

 

I am my own screen as well as the environment’s projection surface. Other people are my mirror, and I am their mirror. - Manon

I recently had the good fortune to come upon a copy of the catalog for Manon-A Person, which documents the first comprehensive exhibit on the Swiss artist, Manon. While little known in US, Manon has been a pioneer in performance, installation, and photography since the 1970s. Her practice parallels feminist works by artists like Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann and explores sexuality, identity and gender construction through the use of her own body.

In 1966, the young artist rejected her civil name and became Manon, after the title character of a Henri-Georges Clouzot film. Critic Thomas Wynn has described Clouzot’s heroine as a “disembodied and mythical seductress.” It seems this is an apt description of the artist too, as she lures us to her through a constant state of disappearance. Much like Cindy Sherman, Manon hides herself through the act of disguise and display.

Both Manon and Sherman play roles and use masquerade to critique identity construction. In the series Ball of Loneliness, Manon photographs herself as a series of characters waiting alone on a dark couch. She plays countless roles including a housewife, a sex kitten, a proper lady, a femme fatale, and street urchin. Who or what are these women waiting for? Are they a group of women united through their mutual loneliness or are they a manifestation of a single psyche? Her 1977, work The Artist Is Present would point to the later. In this performance, the artist employed a group of young women to become Manon impersonators.

Manon, Ball of Loneliness, 1980

Cindy Sherman, Bus Riders, 1977

Manon, The Artist Is Present, 1977

Manon understands the power of self-construction when she says “I wanted to be my own product in the form of space, in the form of photograph, a picture, a performance.” She produces herself over and over again through a highly stylized replication that is predicated on duality. Like a movie star, Manon is ephemeral; she exists only as a series of images, gestures, costumes, and objects.

The exhibit, Manon- A Person originated in Helmhaus Zurich and will be on view at the Swiss Institute in New York April 29- June 20, 2009. An archive of works and biographical information can be viewed on the artist’s website (English version still under construction.)

Sugar is dangerous: Sweet Movie

Dusan Makavejev’s 1974 film Sweet Movie, opens with a rather unorthodox beauty pageant. In this contest, the freshest virgins from around the globe display their finery, not in a swimsuit competition, but rather, through an onstage gynecological exam! The shock of the Miss World pageant pales in comparison to the countless displays of unabashed public sex, a urine- and vomit-soaked orgy, and the striptease seduction of preadolescent boys by a grown woman.

Makavejev, most well known for WR: Mysteries of the Organism is Yugoslavian and his films certainly contain ample historical and political references. Eastern European history isn’t my strong suit, so I prefer to focus on the symbolic and visceral aspects of the film.

Sweet Movie has at its center the story of two women, the virgin, Miss World 1984 and the whore, Captain Anna Planeta, a revolutionary prostitute who has been exiled from her homeland and forced to reside on her candy-filled boat named “Survival.” Anna is forlorn and she laments that all her lovers are dead. That’s because she is a black widow who lures men and boys alike to their demise in her sticky lair. Before stabbing her lover Potemkin, she gently purrs in his ear “sugar is dangerous” as they copulate in a tub of the white stuff. Anna is sexually free, but in the end, she is captured and punished for her murderous ways.

Both women have limited mobility, but this is shown most dramatically in the mute and doll-like Miss World 1984. Throughout the film she rarely moves of her own volition; she is carried and wheeled, and most disturbingly stuffed into a suitcase and shipped around the globe. She is the female body as commodity, as pure fetish object birthed for consumption. As the film concludes we see Miss World being filmed in a vat of chocolate sauce. Where Karen Finley’s chocolate-smeared performances in the 90s were filled with rage and sexual power, Miss World, her polar opposite, is catatonic and closed off from her own bodily experience.

This idea of waking up to one’s life is echoed in a musical interlude that plays throughout the film. In a simple song, a female voice asks “is there life after birth?” Makavejev seems to ask are we really alive to our bodies, emotions and experiences, or are we simply automatons who have been dulled by repeated cultural tyranny? He was heavily influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s controversial research into the link between sexual repression and neurosis, and Makavejev often uses displays of unfettered erotic play as an expression of complete liberation. Over time, the film has remained challenging, because it gets down to deeply ingrained taboos against the oozing, dirty, raw, and ultimately mortal body.

Makavejev taps into the abject most directly in the scenes at the Milky Way Commune, where Miss World sits listlessly while acts of debauchery swirl around her. Many of the members of the fictional commune were actual members of Otto Muehl’s Actions -Analytic Kommune. Founded in 1970, the commune was an offshoot of the Vienna Actionist performance group that included Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Gunter Brus. Muehl saw sexual repression as the cause of a litany of social ills, including, fear, aggression, antisocial behavior, depression and creative impotency. As a healing device, the group enacted frequent regressive therapy sessions aimed to recover infantile sexual urges.

 image from Otto Muehl's cosinus apha, 1964

The first commune scene in Sweet Movie displays a vigorous orgy of meat, piss, shit, and vomit around a large dining table. One man pulls a slab of cow tongue out the opened zipper of his pants and proceeds to chop away at his proxy penis. While we know it is a fake, the proximity and visceral likeness evoke a powerful repulsion. Later, we witness a grown naked man, rolling around on a dingy mattress like a giant baby. He freely urinates and plays with his own shit as onlookers violently strike his chest and douse him in clouds of flour. The images are disturbing, yet powerful in their ability to reveal the ingrained fears we all have against the physical and emotional outpourings our own bodies and our ultimate collapse into death. 

With Sweet Movie, Makaejev cracks off the candy coating and shocks us into a realization of the limits of our freedom from both internal and external forces. He prods us to wake up to the real experience—both the beauty and the horror—of our flesh.