Bodily Functions in Performance: A Study Room Guide On Shit, Piss, Blood, Sweat and Tears (2013)
Bodily Functions in Performance: A Study Room Guide On Shit, Piss, Blood, Sweat and Tears (2013)
Bodily Functions in Performance: A Study Room Guide On Shit, Piss, Blood, Sweat and Tears (2013)
2013
Bodily Functions
In Performance
A Study Room Guide on
Shit, Piss, Blood, Sweat
And Tears.
The following are notes for Lois Keidans presentation for Blackmarket No 11 2008, on the
theme of bodily functions in performance, with added images and recommendations for
further research and study.
Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge No 11
On WASTE: The Disappearance and Comeback of Things
Saturday 29 November, 2008, Liverpool
A Blackmarket is an interdisciplinary research on learning and un-learning where narrative
formats of knowledge transfer are tried out and presented. The installation imitates familiar
places of knowledge exchange, like the archive or library reading room, and combines them
with communication situations such as markets, stock exchanges, counselling or social
service interviews.
Each Blackmarket presents a different topic, generating an encyclopaedia with local experts.
In Liverpool, the theme dealt with the relationship between human beings and their material
world, the moment when things lose their form, deteriorate, rot, explode, slide into decay;
and when remembrance and forgetting lose their distinction. In our economy of waste,
garbage is the repressed side of consumption, whilst non-biodegradable, radioactive toxins
have made waste an ecological survival problem. In response to this we have developed a
range of methods to stabilise waste, such as recycling, burning, conserving or archiving.
Blackmarket No 11 was part of the Bluecoats Liverpool Live programme for the Liverpool
Biennial 2008 (P1126). Presented in association with the Live Art Development Agency.
Supported by Arts Council England, Liverpool Culture Company and the Goethe Institute
Manchester.
www.mobileacademy-berlin.com
Introduction
Ever since visual artists of the late 20th century rejected objects
and markets and turned to their own bodies as the site and
material of art, the radical methodologies of performance art
have continued to influence artists working at the edges of
visual art, theatre, dance and other contemporary disciplines.
This gene pool of practices and approaches is referred to in the
UK and increasingly elsewhere as Live Art and is now widely
understood to be one of the most vibrant creative practices and
instrumental cultural contexts for artists who are working across
forms, contexts and spaces to open up new artistic models, new
languages for the representation of ideas and identities, new ways
of activating audiences, and new strategies for intervening in
public life.
Live Art is impossible to define or fix, but central to much of the
work that can be framed by this term is an investment in ideas of
process and presence rather than the making of things. Live Art
is concerned with the nature and the experience of art, and often
pursues these concerns through the employment of the body as
both its object and subject.
For many artists the body is a loaded and potent site and
one has only to consider the performance work of Marina
Abramovi, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, the Vienna Aktionists,
Gina Pane and Stelarc in the 1960s and 1970s to understand
the transgressive history of the body in relation to art and the
significance of art in relation to the body. And Live Art continues
to evolve as a space to embody a whole range of urgent and
complex cultural discourses - for artists who are for example
concerned with the negotiation and representation of racial,
sexual and gender identity, their bodies are politically invested
sites to break apart traditions of representation.
Shit
Piero Manzoni
Merda dartista (1961)
Were going to start with shit and the most famous of shit artists - Piero
Manzoni. In Milan in the 60s Manzoni staged a series of radical exhibitions
of multiples including Corpi dAria (Bodies of Air) - an edition of 45 balloons
that could be blown up by the buyer, or the artist himself, and Fiato dArtista
(Artists Breaths), a series of balloons, inflated and attached to a wooden
base inscribed Piero Manzoni- Artists Breath. Continuing his explorations
into the limits of physicality, whilst critiquing the Art Worlds preoccupation
with permanence and commodification of ideas, in 1961 Manzoni created
90 small cans, sealed with the text Merda dArtista (Artists Shit). Each 30gram can was priced by weight based on the current value of gold (around
$1.12 a gram in 1960). According to Wikipedia one of the most recent cans
to be auctioned, #19, sold on 26 February 2007 in the USA for $80,000 and,
apparently, that The contents of the cans remain a much-disputed enigma
(since opening them would destroy the value of the artwork). But I have no
reason to doubt that the cans contain Manzonis own shit the cans are
7
not just a great joke, but a work with conceptual and aesthetic integrity that
is about the nature and value of art, and the nature and value of the human
condition. By placing the artists body in all its functionality at the centre of
the debate, Manzoni has been hugely influence on artists for generations to
come.
Stuart Brisley
Museum of Ordure (2002)
10
Piss
11
Mad for Real are London-based Chinese performance artists who see the city
as their gallery and stage: performing public pranks to provoke debate about
socio political issues and cultural values and asking what art is and what can
it do. Often literal in their references and materials (for example having public
food fights using soya sauce and ketchup fights to symbolize East and West
cultural differences and conflicts, seeing Tracy Emins bed as a bed and not
an artwork), they reappropriate ready-mades as the functional things they
are. In 2000 they staged an intervention in the galleries of Tate Modern, using
Duchamps Fountain as it was originally intended to be a urinal.
12
Lisa Wesley
GoinGone (1999)
Lisa Wesleys piece Goin...Gone took place in a space strewn with thousands
of copies of pages from a five-act play (complete with character names
and stage directions). Sitting at a pub table and drinking a pint of her own
piss she performed, almost to herself, the given drama (which was a kind of
Tim Etchells-esque narrative about Saturday night lowlife in pursuit of sex,
oblivion and redemption) over and over and over again. But at each point in
the cycle of repetition her body became increasing absorbed by/immersed
in the narrative - the texts become concrete as she literally consumed all the
peanuts, crisps, condoms and piss that are the trappings of a night out in any
British city. She scrawled fragments of the text onto herself and sellotaped
pages of the manuscript all over her body until she literally disappeared into
it.
13
Jerome Bel
Jerome Bel(1995)
movement in time and space. Using a language of symbols and codes he lets
his performers bodies, or the objects linked to them, tell their own story.
Jerome Bel, from 1995, is the companys signature piece and remains one of
their most acclaimed works.
Enumeration and revelation, rhyme and poetry are the constants of the work
of Jerome Bel - Any dominant principle is here held in check, even when the
matter is about sexuality and eroticism. LHumanite
Flesh is the centre of this exploration which indisposes, irritates, delights,
amuses but doesnt let you stay indifferent. Le Soir
14
Blood
15
Franko B
Oh Lover Boy (2001)
Working with sculpture, painting, photography, video and live action, the UK
based Italian artist Franko B is at the forefront of artists testing not only the
limits of the permissible in representations of the body, but the limits of the
material body itself. In Franko Bs live work his abject, naked, monochromatic
and bleeding body is a site to express the sacred, the profane and the
unspeakable and an invitation to witness the human condition at its most
carnal, exposed and essential. In a culture where images of violence and
extremity have become daily entertainment, Franko B employs his bleeding
body as an affirmation of life and beauty and makes the unbearable bearable.
In Oh Lover Boy he lies on a tilted white canvas with canulas in his arms and
his blood slowly flows down the canvas in rivulets, he leaves imprints of his
body on the canvas.
16
Ron Athey
Incorruptible Flesh
(2006)
Many artists working with their bodies in such visceral ways have engaged
with pain, suffering and endurance in their work. Sometimes as a means to
personal transcendence, sometimes as a means of catharsis for society,
sometimes to signify the obsolescence of the body in a technological age
and sometimes to confront us with our own demons - the demons we often
chose to deny or ignore. Indeed notions of pain and art, blood and ritual
go way back - as Mary Renault wrote of Greek mythology when blood
sacrifice is abandoned it must be replaced by a ritual created by an artist.
Performance Art took up this challenge and ran with it and as we see in the
work of Ron Athey are still running with it. The blood and pain in Atheys
work are a continuation of the influential legacy of Eurocentric Performance
Art traditions. It is what the blood and pain in Atheys work represents and
signifies that singles it out as such potent and politicised work about our
times and of our times.
Taking himself, his performers and his audience to the limits of physical and
emotional endurance, Ron Atheys early extraordinary performance language
revolves around feverish religious tableaux and scenes of ritualistic piercing
and blood-letting. As an HIV positive man dealing with the taboos of blood,
pain and death, as a gay man negotiating love, sex and life, as an atheist
raised under the overwhelming shadow of the Pentecostal church, as a
tattooed and pierced Modern Primitive and as an artist demonised by the
religious and political right in the USA, Ron Atheys work touches upon some
of our harshest realities and darker truths.
17
Kira OReilly
Kira OReillys early work was concerned with the opening up of the body
and often involved controlled acts of body marking and blood-letting. In
Bad Humours/Affected, she placed a pair of leeches on her back and, as
they slowly sucked away on her inviting flesh, trickles of blood flowed down
her back and her long white skirt. For Wet Cup and Unknowing she worked
with another age old treatment for troubled women, wet cupping, a similar
technique to purging-by-leech but using heated suction cups and scalpels.
Kira uses her bleeding and bloodied body as a physical and metaphorical
signifier to contest identity politics and as an act of exposure, and control, of
the self herself.
Kiras blood based performances are, highly charged and uncomfortable; they
are not easy - on her or on us. They ask you to bear witness to an action you
may not want to see and to consider something you might prefer to ignore
and, in the process, they implicate you. They are raw and brutal but also
captivating, touching and haunting, engaging you emotionally, physically and
intellectually. They are experiences, like the experience of body itself, that
are beyond language.
18
Sweat
19
Yann Marussich
Blue Remix (2008)
20
Tue Greenfort
Condensation (2008)
For Frieze Art Fair 2008 the Danish artist Tue Greenfort excavated a chamber
between gallery stands to present an installation that was literally a
distillation of the essence of visitors to the fair. While inside a darkened room
filled with the sound of waves, dehumidification equipment imperceptibly
extracted moisture from unsuspecting visitors - collecting sweat and breath
and pumping it through plastic tubing into recycled water bottles, visible in a
glass-walled aperture. Greenfort wants us to think about our relationship with
water, and the ecological wastefulness of drinking the fancy imported stuff.
21
Lone Twin
Days of Sledgehammer (2004)
Barry Laing wrote in Realtime Lone Twin are ecologists. In The Days of
the Sledgehammer Have Gone, enthusiastically engaged in becoming
the weather, they ponder the sinister and ludicrous past of water as it
circulates in the perpetual hydrological cycle including rivers, clouds, rain
and us. The human body is 75% water and therefore inextricably implicated
in this cycle. Gary wonders if these waters, passed as sweat, may have been
encountered before: my sweat, your sweat, Jimmy Connors sweat, Bruce
Springsteens sweatwhich happens to be Greggs favourite sweat at the
moment. Sweat figures crucially as the by-product of labour, endurance and
a commitment to the completion of extreme physical tasks.
Clad inappropriately in Army surplus ponchos and hiking shoes, various
paraphernalia including Norwegian hunting horns and with the ubiquitous
clipboards slung around their necks, Lone Twin attempt to make a cloud!
Concealed beneath the ponchos, each performer labours buried in multiple
layers of clothing, accumulating body heat: Gregg for 6 hours collecting water
from the Yarra river that day, Gary for much of the performance with vertical
rows of theatre lights one foot away, performing a rain dance that looks like
dog-paddle standing up. This is what I do to feel a part of things; this is what
I do to blur my edges. Either side of more stories and points, increasingly
funny, entangled, gentle, yearning and touching on acts of kindness, the
audience is invited to throw cups of Yarra water over Gary and Greggs bare
22
23
Tears
24
Stacy Makishi
You Are Here, But Where Am I?
(2002)
The central image of You Are Here was Stacy Makishi catching her tears.
She was trying to mark the journey of a person who crossed two oceans (salt
water under the foot) and the tears that these journeys induced.
She wrote I was attached to a saline drip which dripped tears down my eyes.
There were two funnels placed below my eyes that would catch the tears
and filter them down my body via tubes that ran all the way down to my feet.
Under each foot there were two rubber pumps that would catch the water
and then with each step I took, would pump the water all the way up over my
25
head and down my cheeks as tears once again. While I performed with this
apparatus at Lime Street Station, I performed foreignness. I was an islander,
not of the continent, an incontinent, surrounded by an ocean of tears. With
every step I took, I produced another tidal wave of tears.
There is an illness associated to Alzheimers called pathological crying or
emotional incontinence. Im interested in the word Alzheimer. Alz-heim-er.
Heim is the German word for home, or homeward. I wonder if Alzheimers is
having chronic homesickness? Freud says love is homesickness.
Hayley Newman
Crying Glasses (An Aid to Melancholia) (1995)
George Chakravarthi
Genesis (1998)
After leaving full-time education at the age of sixteen. Chakravarthi spent his
teenage years homeless, hustling and negotiating his way though London
before enrolling for art school. There his continuing examination of his own
selfhood generated a practice and approach that deconstructs socially
accepted definitions of gender, sexual and racial identity, the intense scrutiny
of his personal experience challenging those received wisdoms.
Chakravarthi considers much of his work to be a series of self-portraits.
As a multi-disciplinary artist he draws inspiration from cinema, art history,
public and private spaces, and from collective social histories. Chakravarthi
engages the viewer with his honest exploration of universal emotions. Using
experiences from his own life, he often reveals painful situations, memories
and experiences with an acute sensibility, cogent perceptions and generous
humanity.
Genesis is performance to camera Filmed in real time, and explores human
emotions and physical metamorphosis as Chakravarthi reveals a series of
sentiments and passions.
28
Breaths
A0190 Colin Perry, Stuart Brisley: Crossing (2008)
V0603 - Stuart Brisley (a film by Ken McMullen), Ten Days
V0715 - Stuart Brisley, The Eye Illuminations Series (2004)
David Hoyle
D1015 - David Hoyle, David Hoyle Magazine 2008 Background
Projection
D1123 - David Hoyle, Magazine The Reprint
D1401 David Hoyle, Sacred 2009- David Hoyles Theatre of Therapy
No. 6 of 26. For the complete series at SACRED see REF D1396-D1421
D1413-D1419 David Hoyle, Sacred 2009- On the Couch with David Hoyle
No. 18-24 of 26. For the complete series at SACRED see REF D1396-D1421
D1660 David Hoyle, Magazine: 10 Live performance essays by David
Hoyle
D1691 David Hoyle, Bird la Bird, Lisa Blackman, Adrian Heathfield,
Trashing Performance, Under and Overwhelmed: Emotion and
Performance, Panel Discussion
D1779 David Hoyle, Daves Drop-In Centre (2009)
D1847 David Hoyle, Nathan Evans, Revelations: The Films of David
Hoyle and Nathan Evans
D1857 Avant-Garde Alliance, Uncle David (2010)
A0198 - David Hoyle, If you want theatre
Hoyle at Duckie
Review of David
Ron Athey
www.ronatheynews.blogspot.co.uk
www.ronathey.com [under construction 12/06/13]
Ron Athey, Pleading In The Blood, The Art and Performances of Ron
Athey ed. By Dominic Johnson (2013)
D0272 Ron Athey, Judas Cradle (2005)
D0356 Ron Athey, Hallelujah! (1997)
D0433 Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper, The Judas Cradle and
Documentary (2005)
D0709 Ron Athey and Dominic Johnson, Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual
Wound) (2007)
D1474 Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey, Performing Idea: Reciprocal
Aesthetics (2010)
A0209 Ron Athey, An Interview With Ron Athey (1994)
A0132 Amelia Jones, Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana
Snappers Judas Cradle in The drama Review (2006, Vol:50 No:1, pp.159169)
A0145 John OBrien, Ron Athey
A0246 Dominic Johnson, Perverse Martyrologies An Interview with
Ron Athey in Contemporary Theatre Journal (2008, Vol:18 No:4, pp.50333
513)
V0024 Ron Athey, Four Scenes In A Harsh Life (1994)
EV0044 Ron Athey, Deliverance (1995)
V0196 Ron Athey / Julie Tolentino, Deliverance W.I.P (1995)
V0207 Ron Athey / Lawrence Steger, Incorruptible Flesh (1997)
EV0225 Ron Athey, Franko B, Orlan and Fakir Musafar, Body Art The
South Bank Show (1998)
V0276 Ron Athey, Solar Anus (1998)
EV0531 Cyril Kuhn (Ron Athey), The Solar Anus (1995)
Kira OReilly
www.kiraoreilly.com
P1219 Various, SPILL Tarot Pack (2009)
D0297 Kira OReilly, Untitled Action For Hong Kong Arts Centre (2004)
D0298 Kira OReilly, In the Wrong Placeness (2005)
D0323 Kira OReilly, Succour (2002)
A0021 Kira OReilly, The You & The I in Performance Research (2003,
Vol:8, No:2 pp.138-139)
A0358 Branislava & Kira OReilly, Sta(i)r Falling in Performance
Research (2011, Vol:16, No:1, pp.91-101)
V0248 Kira OReilly, Bad Humours / Affected (1998)
EV0249 Kira OReilly, Irina Prova, 13 (1999)
EV0347 Kira OReilly, Wet Cup (2000)
DB0039 Kira OReilly, Talking Heads: Kira OReilly
34
37