warming up: a queer porn screening and conversation

warming up: a queer porn screening and conversation at FEVERHEAD
saturday, february 25, 2012
5:00pm-7:00pm
18+ age limit
suggested donation $2-5

Join us for a queer porn screening presenting work by directors Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, and Madison Young, introduced and facilitated by Michael J. Morris. If we consider pornography to be an archive of human sexual behavior, queer porn makes important social contributions by giving representation to bodies, sexualities, and sex that go otherwise unacknowledged and often disavowed within our society’s mainstream cultural productions. In a society in which bodies/people are identified by markers such as gender, sex, and sexuality; in which rights and value are mediated on the bases of these identifications; and in which media—including pornography—plays significant roles in shaping our perceptions of both ourselves and of others: the production and screening of this material takes on substantial social and political dimensions. We invite you to come enjoy a sampling of sexy scenes by award-winning filmmakers and performers, to take part in dialogue about the social and cultural relevance of this work, and to consider pornography as a productive site of knowledge in addition to its erotic functions.

We will be screening scenes from Shine Louise Houston’s HeavenlySpire.com, Courtney Trouble’s Roulette: Toronto, and Madison Young’s Fluid: Men Redefining Sexuality; with performances by James Darling, Quinn Valentine, Jiz Lee, Drew Deveaux, River Turner, Tommy Midas, Rose, and Devi Lynne.

For more information, contact Michael at morris.787@osu.edu
Michael J. Morris is a PhD student and Graduate Teaching Associate in the Department of Dance at the Ohio State University, doing research in the areas of performance, sexuality, and queer theories of the body.

This event is made possible through the support of CoCo Loupe, FEVERHEAD, and Queer Behavior; and the generous permissions of Shine Louis Houston and Pink and White Productions, Courtney Trouble, Madison Young, and Good Releasing.

RSVP on the facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/events/210505295702709/

http://feverhead.com/
http://queerbehavior.com/wordpress/
http://pinkwhite.biz/
http://courtneytrouble.com/
http://madisonbound.com/
http://goodreleasing.com/

Performer/collaborators: Jassem Hindi (France/Lebanon), Julie Phelps, Emily Leap, Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit, Jorge De Hoyos, Hana Erdman, Gabriel Todd, Ruairi O’Donovan (Ireland), Karina Sarkissova (Sweden), Empress Jupiter, Keith Hennessy plus special guests

I arrive at CounterPULSE at 7:58pm. I have never shown up that close to the start of a performance; I feel late even though I have two minutes to spare. I stand in line for will call tickets behind my friend Jiz. I am introduced to the person with whom they are speaking—her name might have been Jessica, but I don’t remember for certain—and “Jessica” comments that it’s nice to meet me and that she loves my eyebrows. I say thank you, that they are usually more manicured, but because I’ve been traveling they have gotten a bit out of control.

When we enter the performance space, there is already more happening than I can fully recount. There are more people in the audience than there are seats, and there is a kind of commotion of people greeting one another, moving in and out of the rows of seats, and trying to figure out where might be an acceptable place to sit. I say hello to Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle, and Joseph Kramer, with whom I performed earlier that morning at the Love Art Laboratory’s White Wedding to the Sun. On the stage space—a designation which will fluctuate in usefulness as the performance unfolds—members of the audience are lying in what feels like heaps, receiving various forms of body work from the cast of performers. Walking into this scene, it has already become difficult to clearly mark when the performance began; the ending will be similar in its ambiguity.

The first moment that I recognize as an image to be recognized is a human pyramid with six performers, each with their head wrapped in a sash of dazzling gold material.

photo by Jiz Lee

I am struck by the amount of information that is contained within a relatively simple image: this is a precarious structure; it will eventually collapse. It is composed of exhaustible bodies, and although the exact moment of each one’s threshold of exhaustion cannot be predicted, I can recognize that each component of the structure, each person/body, is operating within its own mysterious but inevitable timetable of fatigue. These performers are masked, made anonymous by radiant gold hoods. It would be simple enough to read this as a metaphor for the economy, or for any such social institution that is constructed from unforeseeable and unsustainable variables. I cannot help but see this human pyramid of hooded figures alongside the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, in which prisoners were stacked in similar pyramids, naked except for hoods that rendered them faceless. And these are perhaps significant associations. But they also seem to me too easy. The genius of this piece is not that it finds clever choreographic representations of society or of the economy; to understand Turbulence in this way—or, indeed, to be satisfied understanding any dance work in this way—impoverishes the dance itself. It is not enough that this human pyramid, amongst many other such choreographic experiments, might be considered metaphorical or representational (and to be clear, it can certainly be considered in these ways). More importantly, it is an experiment with bodies. I cannot abandon the connections between the dance and the economy or American society. It is, after all, entitled Turbulence (a dance about the economy). But the connections I make between the dance and the economy, the economic aboutness of the dance, are not representational. It is as if the forces that shape the economy, or at least the popular understanding of the economy (it would be interested to hear an economist’s perspective on this dance), had been put to these bodies. What happens when bodies form exhaustible and unsustainable structures? What happens when bodies assume the postures of tortured prisoners, here with no real threat of bodily injury, here fully clothed and hooded in gold? What happens when bodies grip one another in counterbalance and spin with such force that they barely maintain control? What happens when bodies spinning out of control collide? What happens when there are innumerable small actions being designed and executed, but any comprehensive oversight of all actions is impossible? What happens when bodies are displaced from the spaces that afford them identity (spectators put on stage, performers occupying the audience)? Rather than this dance representing the economy and the many forces that shape and are shaped by the economy, Turbulence seems to be produced through taking such abstract economic forces as the choreography and design for this performance, for these bodies.

The action of the performance is a bit of a circus, more happening than I can take in at the time or recount after the fact. And it is for the most part improvised, although informed by collaborative residencies held over the last year. Actions that stayed with me: an interactive project in which audience members were asked to read the labels in one another’s clothing as shout out where the items were made (I was wearing “Canada,” “China,” and “USA”); other audience members were transcribing the names of these countries with sharpies onto cardboard taped to the stage; performers wrestling with one another with full body force, tugging one another to the floor and back up again, struggling in such a way that seemed more about exhausting their bodies than overpowering one another; performers gripping one another’s arms in counterbalance and spinning with such force that they barely stayed in control of their motion and often collided with one another; one person being pinned down on the stage by five others, in a moment that evoked gang rape or mugging or a restraining a struggling prisoner or patient; performers directing one another and the audience during the performance; a trapeze act with three performers (Emily Leap, Jorge De Hoyos, and Keith Hennessy);

photo by Jiz Lee

Leap crumpled on the floor while Jesse Hewit reads from a notebook, whispering (but with a microphone) in her ear about love and tenderness, a shared history, risk, dancing an impossible dance, the desire to outmuscle exhaustion (this was a quote I believe was attributed to Peggy Phelan; I believe the full quotation reads:
“Love, despite its toxicity and violence, can bring us closer to the possibility of expressing human tenderness. If one is ambitious enough to want to create a shared history, then one must be willing to risk an impossible dance, one that pivots on a desire to outmuscle exhaustion, a desire alive to our wavering capacities to bestow and receive responses, and an apparently insatiable desire to question these capacities and what motivates and blocks them, repeatedly.”);
a game in which audience members are invited to exchange with performers whatever they had too much of; shouting (lots of shouting) throughout the performance; Hennessy reading a text that sounds like a polemic of some kind, but is obscured by the additional layers of sound and action reverberating in the space; the frenzy of the space breaking into a dance party, fueled by Rihanna and champagne and even a roasted chicken. Throughout all of this action, I am tracking the chaotic blurring of boundaries, borders like performer and spectator, beginning and ending, in control and out of control. I am aware of competing forces, forces (aural, physical, etc.) that are sometimes in oppositional conflict, and are at other times merely in parallel competition for attention. Much of the performance feels as if it is enacted somewhere between anger and exasperation. It feels like a protest, but a protest of many things at once, with no clear focus (and while these are descriptions that have been leveled at the Occupy movement, Hennessy’s website offers that this piece was instigated before the recent Occupy Wall Street actions: http://www.circozero.org/performances/turbo/index.html).

The organization of the stage space reminded me of a piece I wrote about earlier this year, Morgan Thorson’s Heaven. The space was large and predominantly white. It contained various “stations”: the sound boards and microphones in one corner of the stage, a large trapeze hanging just off of center, cardboard taped to the walls and floor. As the dance unfolds, similar to in Heaven, places around the space become indexed as the place where they _____. This mapping of the space is filled with overlap and revision. The corner of the stage where two dancers laid on top of one another becomes the corner where the audience members sat after being brought on stage. The central area where dancers spun almost out of control becomes the area where they danced to Rihanna, drank champagne, and shredded chicken onto one another’s bodies and the floor. In both dances, there is always more than one thing happening simultaneously, one action bleeding into another set alongside another and in competition with another. While the overall effect of Turbulence in no way resembled the overall effect of Heaven, these formal similarities situated Hennessy’s piece within a larger landscape of the field of dance.

I was also reminded more than once of the work Félix González-Torres. This had mostly to do with materials. Near the middle of the piece (or perhaps closer to the end), the largest and most extravagant prop piece was brought onto the stage: a massive gold curtain, probably somewhere around 10 feet by 15 feet, and which likely cost in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

image of gold curtain from previous performance of Turbulence

Performers walked at the edges of it, crawled underneath it, pulled against it, wrapped themselves up in it, all the while throwing dazzling light wildly around the space. There were some moments at which I could hardly look at it, the light was too intense. I was reminded of González-Torres’ golden curtains (I recently saw one installed at the Art Institute of Chicago).

In a museum, González-Torres’ curtain introduces a spectacular campy glamour to what might otherwise be designed as a pristine, respectable space. Both curtains— González-Torres’ and the prop used in Turbulence—are ostentatious. They are excessive, too large, to sparkly, too showy. They overpower the space with grandeur, and in both instances, I am made self-conscious of that moment when I must simply look away. This formal association with González-Torres gave Turbulence a situation in art history for me, and a distinct tie to queer art and queer formalism. In the performance, the brilliant Empress Jupiter ranted about the curtain as cash, as gold, as wealth and status. It was all of these things, both symbolically and literally (again, this was not an inexpensive prop). But it was also kind of tacky in its glamour, just a bit “too much” (where would you hang a gold sequined curtain of these dimensions?), extravagant in a way that reinforced the theme of excess in the work overall, and makes you avert your eyes once or twice.

The intersection of extravagance and exhaustion is excess. Extravagance exceeds the necessary, ranges into wasteful; exhaustion is the full expenditure of that which is available. Turbulence pushes madly into both extravagance and exhaustion as if to interrogate—sometimes playfully, sometimes brutally—what is possible on the other side of each. What is possible when dancing in excess of material necessity and physical stamina? What emerges from or lingers after such bacchanalian excess, where there is no single direction or director that can be held accountable for all that has transpired, where no single participant or observer can attend to a majority of what has happened? When we cannot say for certain when it began or when it had ended; when the spaces and coextensive identities designated “stage” and “audience,” “performer” and “spectator,” have been so thoroughly transgressed from either direction, what then? It would not be consistent with the nature of the work to even attempt a single or succinct conclusion. What I can recount is a variety of reactions: some people left once they realized that the performance was, for them, over; others began to engage in conversations, some talking about the work itself, others discussing the economy or the Occupy movement, others just catching up with old or new friends; many of the performers, and some people who were in attendance as spectators, cleaned the stage, struck the set, put away equipment, etc. Eventually, I left with my friend Jiz to get a drink and some food. I might suggest that, at least in this instance, what happens on the other side of excess is not predictable. It remains a variable, even once it has arrived. By its nature, it has exceeded what one was prepared to describe; to find oneself in excess—temporally, spatially, physically, financially, sensorially, etc.—is to exist in ways that exceed preexisting terms of description. I want to resist valorizing or demonizing this state; for now, judging whether to exist on the other side of excess is “good” or “bad” does not seem a useful question (I might suggest that it is rarely if ever a useful question). Instead, I want to focus on the unpredictability of excess, excess as a space of possibilities and potentialities. When the preexisting terms or frameworks have been exceeded, new terms or frameworks must be developed. This is the creative potential of excess. There are numerous theories and theorists with which/whom I might correlate these observations. The association of queerness with excess has been written widely, for example. However, what comes to mind immediately is a quote from Donna Haraway that I read recently: “Breakdown provokes a space of possibility precisely because things don’t work smoothly anymore,” (Haraway How Like A Leaf 115).  This mad drive into excess constitutes a kind of breakdown, and whatever else breakdown constitutes—remorse, regret, loss, disorientation, etc.—it is also the space of possibility, as Haraway suggests, “precisely because things don’t work smoothly anymore.”

I can also describe a kind of state that I experienced after the performance, a kind of disorientation after having my attention pulled in so many different directions simultaneously: a kind of madness from the over stimulation and the overall disintegration of that which I was trying to observe; a kind of hopeful nihilism (if that isn’t too much of a paradox—and if it is, perhaps one more “too much” is fitting), in which no one thing held any special meaning over another thing, and no explanatory framework held true for all that had transpired. It was a feeling of, “Anything goes,” “Sure, okay,” and, “Well, why not?” In this sense, it was positively affirmative without any real investment in anything I might affirm. By the end of the performance (although, again, I cannot quite offer when the performance “ended”), I had pushed through any anxiety about being incapable of explaining or recounting all that I had seen. By the time I left the performance space, I felt very open to possibilities, to what else might be done, to what else might happen. The disorganized proliferation of activity had softened (or numbed) my senses of order or ordering. In this state, very little seemed impossible.

photo by Jiz Lee

for more amazing work by Jiz Lee, visit: http://jizlee.com/wordpress/

Implicit in this sense of subjectivity is an emphasis on relation. It resists the notion of pre-exisiting relata which then form relationships. It considers relationship as the fundamental unit of ontology. In other words, there is no “self” and “the world,” per se. Rather, there is a relation, an intradependency (a relation internal to itself rather than between pre-existing entities or territories), a process or assemblage or system, and from that flow, that relation, we then abstract parts. “Self” and “the world” do not pre-exist the relation; they are constituted by it, they are dependent upon it. This shift in the ontology of subjectivity carries radical implications for ethics/politics/how we live in the world. Part of my work, I believe, will be to consider/theorize/articulate these implications, not exhaustively, but specifically as they are concerned with sexuality.

That’s the other part of my motivation. It is not only about transforming our sense of the world through our understanding of sexuality. It is also about how this shifting from relata to relation, this transformation in how we think “ourselves” as fundamentally processional with the world (language is so difficult here; language resists this shift; this might become part of my project as well), affects how we think/understand/approach sex, sexuality, and even love. The deterritorialization of the subject, the emphasis of relation and the constitutive flow of intradependency, necessarily shifts the concepts of sex and sexuality. For one thing, the body is no longer a closed entity (it never was; this was a fantasy, probably of capitalism, maybe of agriculture, considering the body/self as private property). It cannot be clearly delimited, it can never be contained, and in this sense, it can never be fully possessed. This move towards disindividuation is not new in my work. For a couple of years, I’ve been trying to ground myself in theoretical frameworks that dislodge the notion of the subject as individuated and autonomous, bounded private property. What I want to emphasize here (for myself, for you) is that to no longer consider oneself as one self will affect how we consider/conduct sex, sexual identities, and even relationships. What if sex is not something that takes place between two (or more) people, but is instead a quality of relation, an affective register in which we understand and constitute relations (and thus “ourselves”)? I keep thinking about how practices and philosophies of polyamory might have a lot of sympathy with the “ecosexual subject.” What if love (specifically eros) is not a non-renewable resource? What if we cannot “belong” to one another, because we never truly “belong” to ourselves? What if one relationship does not preclude another? There’s a promiscuity to this kind of ontology, a being that is always becoming, a becoming that is enacted through ceaseless fundamental intra-relationships, of which sex and love are particular qualities.

What I’m trying to articulate here is that in the pursuit of an ecosexuality, there is a shift in how we understand ourselves, and in this shift, how we think and behave sex/sexuality/love changes as well. It doesn’t change in one way; it changes in many, and many more that are unforeseen/unforeseeable.

I have a lot more to consider/theorize/write (dissertation), but I thought it was important to articulate these motivations as well.

It is this second scale, zoomed out as it were, that occupies my thoughts tonight. These are some of the answers that occur to me:
-In opening to the possibilities of ecosexualities, the possibilities that sexuality might be a part of how we experience the world in which we are implicit, there is a necessary rethinking of the boundary between the human and the more-than-human. This rethinking allows value to become more pervasive. It is not my intention to depreciate what we consider to be human; nor is it my intention to expand what we think of as human, to colonize that which is not human under that category in order to ascribe it value. Rather, I’m interested in how the dissolution of that boundary might allow for a more pervasive value for the world in which we are always already implicit.
-Sexuality is a productive site at which to consider this expansion, this dissolution of the clearly human. Sexuality is central to subjectivity, in discourse, in politics, and often in the lived experience. We come into our subjectivity through our entry into the matrix of sexuality. Sexuality is a field in which lives and rights are actively articulated, legislated, contested, and protested. Sex and sexuality, amidst all their complexity and contestation, can be the sites of intensities of pleasure and even rapture, sites of profound interpersonal connection, sites of collective identities and communities. If sexuality is central to subjectivity and the subject is always implicit in the world, then sexuality pervades the world. In many ways, sexuality has been territorialized and restricted to a small set of experiences and encounters; to consider sexuality to be more pervasive in our experience of the world invites the world to becomes more central to our subjectivities, allows the world to be a site of intensities of pleasure and rapture, profound interpersonal connections, and even coalitional identities and communities.

I’m still talking in the language of theoretical discourses. I’m still working through the theories. I want to zoom out farther, make this project more legible outside of these specialized systems of language.

What I mean is: I want to be able to fall in love with the world. I want to be seduced by the world. I want to feel towards the world the bittersweetness of being both made whole (as by a lover), and the profound sense of partiality, lack and incompleteness that are revealed (produced?) by the desire for the lover. I want to allow for the possibility that in/through/with the world around me, I might experience the kind of dissolution that I experience in sex, a pleasure that blurs the boundaries of where I end and my lover begins. Ecology and ecosophy are already predicated on inherent interdependency; autonomy is an abstract fantasy, and the individual is never fully individuated. We (can) know this in/through sex, but in sex we know it through the intense rapture of sensation and pleasure of connection and exchange. An ecological consciousness is a recognition of one’s own interdependency, an interdependency that is only possible if no part is fully sufficient on its own. It depends on a necessary and productive lack. As long as I conceive of myself as separate, as autonomous, as a human who exists separate from but in the world around me, I lack. I must be completed by the world in which I occur in order to be whole. From lack springs desire, eros, the bittersweetness of longing to be complete in the recognition of one’s partiality and insufficiency, and we take pleasure in that bittersweetness of desire, that longing to be whole. Through ecosexuality, I’m looking to find that rapture, to live in the world in such a way that the pleasure of my interdependency, my implication in the world around me, is present, blurring my boundaries, dissolving my self. As long as I remain “myself”—individuated, autonomous, “human”—I lack, and in lacking, experience the pang of desire. I experience pleasure, fulfillment, and wholeness as I let go of the “I” who lacks and surrender to the necessary interdependency in which there is no “I,” only how what has been called “I” functions as part of a much larger system. With this recognition/surrender of “self,” I think there is then a different way to live in/as the world.

Performance is where I’ve seen this lived out, where I’ve seen these ways of living explored and practiced and re-presented. This is the world-making potential of performance, that in the creative act of doing things differently—something that is “allowed for” in performance in ways that are not allowed in other settings—we explore/practice other ways of being in/as the world. This comes with us back into other settings of living, beyond the performance, in small and big ways. I look to performance to see how ecosexuality is lived out.

These ideas are still only sketches, still only beginning to come together, but there is it. In the most basic sense, I want to fall in love with the world. I want to find profound pleasure in the recognition of how I am a part of the world around me, how I am necessarily interconnected, insufficient on my own, lacking without the world to complete me, and in that pleasure, I want to lose track of my edges, explode my boundaries and flow into my experience of being-in/as-the world.

from World Fair, photo by Patrick Imbert

Being surveilled produces the subject/body in a specific sense: a sense of suspension, a sense of anxiety, a sense of anticipation that inscribes the constant observing other as not only a persistent condition of sociality, but—on a phenomenological level—possibly even a constituting condition for our existence. The perhaps uncomfortable reality is that we appear far more for others than we do for ourselves; those who see us see more of us—more of our bodies—than we can ever see of/for ourselves, making our appearance in the world inherently social, and our experience of sociality inherently about seeing and being seen. I found these facets of social existence to be central to World Fair. From “before” the performance began (I say “before” because in this vein of thought it seems important to acknowledge that “the performance” is more of a constant/persistent state of being than it is something that can be demarcated by theatrical spaces, tickets, audience seating, and a specified 8:00pm start time), as the audience was ushered into the performance space, we were directed (itself possibly worthy of comment) to only enter from one side of the audience seating, an entry that necessitated walking past Ouramdane, already displayed on stage. He stood stationary on a large turntable that rotated slowly, displaying the three-dimensionality of his body. His eyes were closed, and it seems to me that this in itself might have functioned as an initiation into the recurrent themes of the piece: we as viewers began in a more-or-less compulsory encounter with the performer, whose closed eyes reminded me that this performance situation (all stage performance situations?) was organized around the axis of our viewing, and his being viewed by us.

Yet Ouramdane’s performance did not situate himself/his body as a passive receptor of our gaze. Throughout the performance, he demonstrated his own complicity in this surveillance of his body: removing his shirt at the start of the performance, a gesture that seemed somehow both medical (“Go ahead and take your shirt off”) and criminal (think strip search), while also more subtly addressing gender itself as a form of surveillance (the removal of the shirt as a kind of confession or confirmation: “Yes, see here, I am indeed a man. Rest assured that there is no ambiguity about my gender/sex, and that, yes, this is an identification that can be made/affirmed by way of my own visibility”); pushing the large counter-weighted light/camera rig hanging center stage as if it were a millstone, contributing his own kinetic energy and strength to the circulation of illumination and recording, both of which at various points mediated his own visibility; the raising on the flat screen television high into the air as if hoisting the national flag, a “national symbol” that was ostentatiously alternatively recorded and live-feed images of the performer himself. In each instance, he revealed his own complicity in the formation of the ways in which he would/could be seen.

I could not help but feel further implicated in this power play of seeing and being seeing by virtue of my position as a member of the audience. Although there were several stage devices that seemed invented for this particular production (namely the large light/camera rig that hung ominously in the center of the stage), by and large, the materials through which this performance was conducted were those of the theater: the relatively intimate proscenium stage, the organization of the audience in relation to the performer, and—most notably—the stage lights. While it is certainly possible to consider this piece for its relationship to—and even commentary on—the world beyond the theater, it is important to recognize that any such relationship or commentary was carried out through these rarefied theatrical tropes. In this sense, although the politics of seeing and being seen that were addressed by the performance extend far beyond the context of the event itself, such extensions never fully evacuate the theater; the political and cultural history and tropes of the theater itself functioned in this piece as both the means of articulation and, to some degree, that which was itself articulated. Large grids of white theatrical lighting hung high above the four corners of the stage, and throughout the performance, their illumination suggested the possibility of visibility from all sides. Although my visual perspective was limited to my particular seat, the activation of these lights on all sides of the performer gave me sense of being able to see even that which was not visible from my point of view.

Circularity was a theme throughout the performance: Ouramdane circled on a turntable at the start of the performance; a small siren-shape sound amplifier circled; the large rig suspended center stage circled; the performer himself circled the space over and again; finally, at various points, the light itself circled, moving from grid to grid in a way that for me evoked a prison yard. But what could possibly be the connection between this theatrical space and a prison yard?

Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish that, “Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere,” (195). He proceeds to discuss Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison designed to heighten the visibility of the prisoners in such a way that the experience of constant surveillance becomes internalized, a perceptual prison that forms from an internalized sense of being seen.

Foucault writes that the principles of the panopticon are opposite those of the dungeon. “In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap,” (200). He continues: “… Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so,” (201). The last point I would like to borrow from Foucault follows: “The heaviness of the old ‘houses of security,’ with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a ‘house of certainty’. The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side – to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection,” (202-203). What Foucault suggests is that the effect of the panopticon, the prison in which the prisoner is fully visible at all times, and in which the prisoner can never fully verify whether or not he is being watched, becomes internalized by the prisoner. The constant awareness of the possibility of being seen restrains him; this sense of internalized anxiety becomes his prison.

This model of the panopticon is pervasive in our modern world. We live in an age of constant surveillance, of our bodies, of our borders, of our information, of others, and of ourselves. We police our own behaviors, our social selves, our gender, etc., always with the anxiety of being seen and the consequences of being seen. Because of its formal properties—the light, open space in which three-dimensional visibility was emphasized time and again, the repetition of the circular form through which such visibility was both evoked and achieved, the circulation of static and moving recorded and live-feed images—themselves demonstrating either their own histories as sites of inspecting/recording the body or the very instance of inspecting a re-presenting the body, the suggestion of the racialized history of minstrelsy and the expropriation/exploitation of bodies encompassed by that history through the brief and unexpected tap dance wearing white face, etc.—World Fair operated in logics similar to those of the panopticon. And it was not only the performer who was enacted through these logics: throughout the performance, Ouramdane’s musical collaborator Jean-Baptiste Julien entered the space and looked directly into the audience, a reminder of our own visibility, our own implication in these regimes of surveillance and regulation.

I have heard several of my colleagues and my students say that World Fair felt incomplete, unfinished, or unresolved. I would like to suggest that this is perhaps the nature of power as it operates through visibility and surveillance: its efficacy is not purely in its ability to follow through, to exact punishment for the transgressions that it observes. Rather, its true power is in the constant state of anticipating such consequences, the internalized apprehension of what might happen, what could happen. By never fully delivering a satiating climax or resolution, Ouramdane’s performance effected a sense of anticipation that I then carried with(in) myself, unfulfilled and unresolved. Like the performance itself, I can never fully predict the consequences of my own visibility, and thus I live with a constant uncertainty and anticipation of how I might be seen. As disorienting as this might seem, the anxiety of visibility, the constant state of uncertain anticipation, and one’s implication in vast systems of seeing and being seen, may in fact be formative of who and what we are. These effects of power are inherent in sociality, and—in ways I will not attempt to explicate here—being itself depends on sociality. Thus, it seems, Ouramdane’s performance of the situation of surveillance is not limited to a commentary on the theater or even the political sphere. To address surveillance seems to address the conditions of ontology itself.

[I had the opportunity to see World Fair on 22 October 2011, at the Wexner Center for the Arts]

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Last week, a colleague of mine named Owen David told me that WBC would be on our campus again. He suggested that we stage some sort of performance response to their presence at OSU. I agreed; while I rarely engage overtly in public protests, it felt important to me to oppose the presence and sanction of these voices in the place I call home. Over the past week, the idea for the performance evolved and developed, settling into its final form this morning. We decided to engage in a walking meditation on intersecting pathways, converging nearby where WBC would be protesting. WBC was set up on the corner of High Street and 12^th Avenue. Owen started approximately 100 feet west of the intersection on 12^th, and I started approximately 100 feet south on High. Our plan was to take twenty-five minutes to walk from our starting positions to our convergence point only a few feet from where WBC were positioned, hopefully finishing our walks around the time that the protest dissipated. Instead, our walks took over an hour. We started when they started, and long after they had gone, we were still progressing. This transformed the situation of the performance, and in doing so provided me with unforeseen significance for what it was we were doing.
This performance/performative protest was intended as a quiet assertion of the visibility and mobility of bodies that would be prohibited under the politics of WBC. It was important that we were not responding in the same social registers as those deployed by WBC (signs, loud music, etc.). Our response was articulated through silence, sustained mobility, concentration, and contemplation. By the end of our walks, several other themes had emerged for me: endurance was significant, not only in the sense of the bodily endurance necessary to take over an hour to walk close to 100 feet, but also in the sense that our presence/action endured/persisted far beyond the presence/action of those to whom we were responding. I was also deeply aware of how my understanding of visibility had shifted by the end of the performance.

It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the overall context in which we enacted this performance/practice. WBC protesters were not the only bodies present on the corner of 12^th and High. In fact, the crowd of counter-protesters dramatically outnumbered the small but vocal WBC crowd. There was also a large police presence on the scene, some officers spread around the periphery of what felt like a rally, but most establishing a line of protection around the protesters from WBC. The crowd that had gathered in opposition was exemplary of the productive force of power, and the unforeseeable/uncontrollable effects of political action. The hate rhetoric of WBC became a foundation for unlikely alliances: those who showed up to oppose the homophobic rhetoric occupied space alongside thus who showed up out of a sense of school spirit, opposing the anti-OSU rhetoric deployed by WBC, as well as those who showed up out of a sense of national patriotism, to defend the country and the military against the attacks issued by WBC. This church opposes the nation and the university, claiming that both institutions enable homosexuality, and that this enabling marks this nation for destruction. However, these attacks produced unlikely results, namely, provoking a response that allied bodies/individuals alongside homosexuals who might not otherwise occupy such a position. Witnessing this was a great reward.

When we started, I immediately felt as if I had conjured myself as invisible. My quiet, slow progression down the sidewalk seemed to vanish alongside the noise and commotion of the protesters on the corner. This was a difficult place to begin: I had come to this place this morning to assert my visibility, my mobility, and at the start it seemed as if my action had effectively erased my presence from the situation. However, the longer I walked, the more those who passed by me in either direction took notice of my presence. Several people spoke to me. One person asked my permission to photograph my walk for his photography course. Others simply stared or observed from a distance or became aware of me as an unexpected obstacle in their path. In this sense, what I had conceived of as an assertion of visibility became something more akin to a journey from invisibility into the very visibility I had intended to assert.

However, this experience of visibility became most important—and significantly reoriented—towards the end of the walk. The crowd had dissipated. WBC had left the corner, and it was once again a seemingly neutral thoroughfare. That was when I became aware of my awareness of Owen. He had been at the periphery of my vision throughout the walk, and although he was far off and through the crowd, I recognized him. As we approached one another in the last few minutes of our walk, I realized that this sustained recognition may have in fact been the vital practice of this performance. I kept thinking of this passage from a lecture by Judith Butler:
“So what I accept is the following: Freedom does not come from me or from you; it can and does happen as a relation between us or, indeed, among us. So this is not a matter of finding the human dignity within each person, but rather of understanding the human as a relational and social being, one whose action depends upon equality and articulates the principle of equality … No human can be human alone. And no human can be human without acting in concert with others and on conditions of equality … The claim of equality is not only spoken or written, but is made precisely when bodies appear together or, rather, when, through their action, they bring the space of appearance into being.”
I had shown up to assert my visibility; what I came to realize over the hour of our walk was that it was actually through this performance/practice that I truly “showed up,” came to appear, came to be visible, to recognize and be recognized. It was through our performance together that we conferred visibility and recognition on one another, and it was in part through the walk itself that we created the conditions for that mutual recognition. As we got closer, I noticed that our steps fell into unison. Neither was fully leading or following; rather, we were moving together. We acted “in concert” with one another, and in doing so, established our own experience and possibility for recognition. Afterwards, Owen commented that as we approached one another, he actually smelled by scent before he saw me directly. As we met, we turned towards one another, made eye contact, and then embraced. Seeing and touch became further iterations of recognizing and being recognized. It seems now that the true significance of this performance lies in this conference of recognition, specifically in the presence and aftermath of those who would erase our existences.

It seems important to me after the fact that so much of this mutual recognition was practiced at the periphery of our vision. We did not look at one another directly until we converged at the finish. This seems to me a very queer experience indeed, to not only see someone, but to recognize him, not straight-on, but obliquely, from the side, at the edge. This indirectness that might be read as a form of queerness seems to also have been implicit in our spatial pathways. We didn’t come from opposing points (a rigid binary), but neither did we presume to come from the same place (alongside one another). These variable experiences of seeing, recognizing, and approaching seem essential (if I may hazard that word choice) to what it means to move through the world queerly, and it seems important that these elements made up the primary materials of this performance.

It also seems important to recognize the inherent connection between recognition and desire, between desire and discourses of sexuality, between recognition/visibility and the political projects of civil rights, specifically those that mobilize around issues of sex, sexuality, and gender identity. I’m afraid I don’t have the time or space to fully address those connections, but my hope is that by suggesting them, I might also suggest possible extensions for today’s performance/practice.

I do not know if we were recognized as other-than-heterosexual, as queers or homosexuals moving, but what I do know is that we presented ourselves as moving through the world differently, as moving out of step with those around us. The very thing that differentiated us from those moving around us—being out of step, our slow and sustained progress, etc.—was also what established our commonality, our visibility to one another, visibility that eventually led to a synchronization of our steps.
How significant that what makes us recognized as different is not necessarily something that we are, but rather a way that we do, and that this doing is simultaneously what set us apart and brought us together . . .

This is a short piece of writing that I did in response to a piece entitled Heaven by Morgan Thorson.
The piece can be viewed in its entirety at http://www.ontheboards.tv/.
This is a nice trailer for the dance:

And this video has some beautiful footage of the piece, as well as some interview footage with the choreographer:

My reading of the piece is not perfectly in line with Thorson’s explanation of her interests/process, but I think they create a lovely dialogue with one another.
I could have written far more about this piece. But it was a productive exercise to restrain the writing to (just under) 650 words.
Here are my words about the piece. Enjoy:

If There Is Always This and Here

Morgan Thorson’s Heaven, premiered in 2010, stages the affective possibilities of materiality. As exemplary of a contemporary “total art,” it choreographs not only the movements of bodies, but renders intentional organization to costumes, props, sets, lighting, and music as they evolve together through time and space. The work consists of a rigorous investigation of the materials from which it is composed—bodies, motion, light, textiles, and sound—offering an account of their immanent significance that relies not on systems of symbolism or representation with which they might be associated, but rather, on the inexhaustibility of their own potential.

Just over an hour long, Heaven unfolds as a boundless proliferation of differences that somehow feel the same. The use of “white” in the piece provides an example of one such proliferation of differences. Through often gradual and occasionally sudden shifts, I come to see white, not as ideal or sacred in its singularity, but as endlessly transformable, itself a composition of light, shadow, depth, and motion, always a different version of itself. The stage floor is white, and the three sides of the performance space are draped in white fabric that sometimes hangs like a veil and at other times billows in monumental waves on the impact of dancing bodies. The dancers are all dressed in assorted shades of white. White is the color of much of the light that throughout the piece reveals other “whites” in the play of lightness and shadow across the many surfaces scattered throughout the performance space. Across and between these surfaces, white unfolds not as a single neutralizing quality to which each surface refers; rather, “white” becomes a richly textured field of infinite variation that asks what else “white” might be.

The treatment of moving bodies is another mode through which Heaven demonstrates its internally differentiated unity. The dance begins in silence with the performers already moving in a lengthy synchronized procession around the parameter of the stage space. At various points during this procession, individuals drop out to engage in other tasks, while the original action of the procession is constantly maintained by at least one performer. This becomes a structural theme of the piece, particular actions carried on by one or more performers while others proceed into other tasks, gestures, and phrases.  Processing continues during bowing, bowing is simultaneous to standing and rolling and colliding, which someone carries on while others move into circling, circling that flows into singing and spinning, spinning while others break into running and later into kneeling, and so on: the cohesion of the choreography comes from its layering, actions always overlapping with other actions, and in doing so, smoothing out what might otherwise register as decisive breaks in a dance so varied in its movement vocabularies. The effect is a busyness of action that somehow over time feels like stillness, a broad domain of movement possibilities that paradoxically simulate uniformity.

In Heaven, Thorson not only accomplishes a compelling example of contemporary performance work that takes its own materiality as the source of its own possibilities of meaning. The title of the piece makes the deployment of many of these materials (pervasive whiteness, dazzling beaded curtains that might elsewhere suggest pearly gates, singing in groups with eyes closed and hands raised, the departure and return of bodies) notable: their abstraction from traditional representations of “heaven” asks us to consider the affective significance of symbols that need not signify, and to consider the immanent sacredness of materiality. What are the sensational possibilities of the physical and the familiar when they are no longer used for religious iconography, but are instead put forward to be considered in their very own glory? Thorson’s Heaven asks how our concepts of transcendence, divinity, or salvation might transform if the materials through which such concepts have been represented were to take on tacit interminable meanings of their own.

In an effort to share a bit of this with some range of readership, I’m posting a piece of writing I did earlier this quarter. It follows the format for “This I Believe” on NPR. You can read the essay guidelines here. Below is my statement of belief, specifically my belief about dance. I’m considering submitting it to “This I Believe,” but either way, I wanted to publish it here:

Who/How I?

I believe that dancing is an act of forming, deforming, and reforming the body/self, a belief that turns back on itself, calling into question this very “I” whose belief is professed. Dancing has taught me that “I” am my body, even if “I” exceed my body and even if my body exceeds “me.”

Language is limited—and limiting—in this way: to articulate myself in speech is always to simplify and to reduce myself within the term “I,” an anonymous first-person that accounts for myself only in ways that are presumed to be shared with all others who have described themselves with this term. Indifferent to whatever words might surround this “I” in a given context, it is the perpetual declaration of a self that remains the same with each repetition; each time this term is deployed, “I” represent myself as unchanged. This is not the only limitation of language: to speak of “my body” is always to figure it as separate from myself, as property—“mine”—which, in order to be possessed, must necessarily be distinct from the “I” who claims it. From within the boundaries of what is speakable then, “I” feel myself questioning, “What of myself is excluded from this term ‘I?’” and protesting, “No! This body is not ‘mine,’ it is me!”

Dancing cannot be limited within these constraints of language. In dancing, “I” am never separate from this body that moves, nor is this body unchanged by its motion. Dancing reveals myself as more fluid than solid, more transient than persistent, continually mutating with each gesture, often in ways uncertain and unforeseen. Through these bendings and flingings and fallings and collidings and tumblings and sinkings; through fleshy places become firm then flaccid, finding firmness once again to only again inevitably become flaccid; through the touch of skin against skin, the calm and sudden disorientation of giving and taking weight that confuses “you” and “I”; through encountering another’s movement as my own, taking in choreography that becomes yet another version of myself; through focus that transforms cells into galaxies and becomes a prayer in the gaps of body-becoming-universe; through calluses and tears, surfaces pushing and opening outward, clarifying the uncertainty of my boundaries; through sweating and bleeding and crying, flowing beyond myself: through dancing, “I” am made as this body, a making that is always both unmaking and remaking.

Dancing reveals myself as a matter of repetition with difference, each moment of movement becoming both this body again and for the first time, each “again” not quite the same as it emerges from the cellular and neural residue of actions that came before. Regardless of whether the movement is thought of as rehearsed or improvised, it is always both, a reiteration of how “I” have been before and an enunciation of how (thus who) “I” am now. As this body moves in so many ways through so many forms, its dancing displaces and replaces this “I”—and this nearly ineffable fluctuation becomes my most fervent belief.

I am intensely interested in this cycle of exhibitions. I was impressed by the exhibits mounted this past spring, particularly the works by Pipilotti Rist, but the “Double Sexus” exhibit and the works by Nathalie Djurberg as well. All three shows for me functioned as significant artistic interventions in the representation and perception of sexuality, perversity, seduction, and the ecstatic–each in unique but productive ways. [As an aside, this was for me an extremely exciting function/position for the Wexner to be taking on, both in the art world, but most specifically within the cultural landscape of Columbus. Too often public institutions, even arts institutions, seem to avoid engaging with issues of sex and sexuality. Such human concerns seem to confer contamination in our culture. To have the Wexner display work that dealt with these issues so directly, and multivalently, was in itself an exciting proposition for the cultural landscape to which it contributes.] Rist’s “The Tender Room” in particular began to address what for me is a profound intersection between issues of sexuality and ecology, the body and the environment, in ways that blurred the distinctions between these tidy constructed binaries and initiated [visual, aural] conversations that made these areas of experience more permeable and pervasive, a plane of possibilities bleeding through imagery and space rather than diagrams situated at the poles of a single dimension. My own research and performance work is currently investigating the concept of “ecosexuality,” and I found Rist’s installation to not only lend itself to “ecosexual analysis,” but also to contribute its own perspectives/observations/affects, articulated within its own terms, to further expand how we might consider/recognize the intersection of sexuality and ecology.

pipilotti rist's "the tender room"

But this new cycle of exhibits promises to explore these (as well as other) concerns even more broadly and directly. Diana Thater’s “Peonies” beautifully problematizes the distinction between the organic and the digital, the cell and the pixel, and (if I might borrow from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) the smooth and the striated. This piece brings me to a state of examining the inherent tensions within the organization of time, space, the history of visual representation, and even (possibly) the convention of biological taxonomies. I am left considering that which exceeds these organizing frameworks, that which flows over from one frame into another (where spatiality becomes temporality, where the digital becomes organic, etc.), and–perhaps most importantly–what exists in the gaps between what can be represented in this frameworks of convention and organization. Her sensual experiments in the clarity and speed of her footage, her employment of tropes of visual culture (such as the grid itself), and even her use of technology as a medium for exploring “nature” functions well as both a precursor and, in a sense, gate keeper for the work to arrive in the other galleries. Among other things, Thater’s work seems to ask me to reconsider–in its most general sense–what I think of as “the natural world,” as well as the romanticism with which it has been historically constructed.

diana thater "peonies"

I am eager to see the other three exhibits. Paula Hayes work with living organisms, as Christopher Bedford so articulately introduced above [see video in WexBlog post, link above], introduces the question of “care” into both the art work itself, but also by extension the art institution, and perhaps even the spectator. I am interested in the potential of this work to introduce new affective and affectionate possibilities into the relationship between the human and the other-than-human. I am interested in the tensions between “care” and “management,” “affection” and “ownership,” and how the care of which Bedford speaks navigates tendencies towards subjectivation and objectification. I am interested in how this work participates in our understanding and production of a world of subjects and objects, and possibly how such concerns might suggest the works’ occupation of a register of sexuality (which is itself a political minefield establishing and enacting a landscape of subjects/objects). Most of all, I’m interested in how this work might be ecology-forming, literally establishing systems of interdependency in/through/as the art works themselves (environmental ecologies, social ecologies, symbolic ecologies, economic ecologies, etc.).

work by paula hayes

Alexis Rockman’s work promises to introduce an element of fantastic speculation to the galleries, imagining complex utopic and distopic visions of “the natural world,” further problematizing this construction through both that which is depicted as well as the methods of depiction. As landscape paintings and renderings of “natural history” are historical practices rich in the romanticization of “nature,” I am interested in how Rockman’s work might reconfigure such constructions through his enactment of similar painterly techniques. The speculative quality of his representations seems to suggest the speculative quality of all reflections of the world in which we [might] live.

work by alexis rockman

Finally Elliott Hundley’s refiguring of “The Bacchae”–for me, easily the most mysterious of the exhibits to come–at the very least seems as if it will introduce further contributions to the contemplation of history, pleasure, and the ecstatic to our cultural landscape. Along with this work, I am over the moon about the fact that Anne Carson will be contributing to the catalogue of Hundley’s work. Carson is one of the most exquisite authors of our time, and to have her contributing to the context and dialogue around this work is an elevating proposition.

work by elliott hundley

Overall, I’m excited by the rich yet-to-be-seen potential of these exhibits, and I continue to commend the Wexner on their active engagement with the production of culture in and beyond Columbus.

“Millions of boys face these problems and solve them in some way or another–they live, as Captain Ahab says, with half of their heart and only one of their lungs, and the world is worst for it. Now and again, however, an individual is called upon (called by whom, only the theologians claim to know, and by what, only bad psychologists) to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone . . . not everyone can or will do that–give his specific fears and desires a chance to be of universal significance . . . one must believe that private dilemmas are, if examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private . . .“
-Erik Erikson, Robert Cole, May Sarton

times have changed, my work has changed, and my [shifting, mobile, fluid] beliefs about the world have changed as well. I no longer believe in universals, and producing work of universal value is no longer my intention. however, I still concern myself with producing work that has value beyond–however much it might be grounded in–my own interests and dilemmas. with each dance I make, each paper I write, each interest towards which I direct my attention and efforts, the question of, “how does this contribute?” arises. especially, as of late, with my primary research, that of ecosexuality as a framework for performance analysis.

one thing that I think is of value in the work I hope to accomplish is writing artists and art works that have not been given critical academic attention into the literature of performance scholarship. the work that interests me–Love Art Lab, Karl Cronin, queer porn, butoh, etc.–is work that has in some cases not been written into scholarship at all, and in most (if not all) cases, not been considered for their potential interventions in the formation/production of sexualities and environmental ecologies. this seems to be an accomplishment worth pursuing in/through my work.

but over the last couple of days, something more/larger has occurred to me. it might even seem obvious, but it has become central to how I understand the potential importance of what I am doing, beyond my own dilemmas or interests (and I am indebted to Maree ReMalia and Deder Gordon for talking through these ideas with me). the fundamental assumption/assertion of the work that I am doing seems to be: through performance we are given access to other possible worlds, other possibilities in/of our world, in ways that reconfigure the sedimented registers of meaning within our cultures and societies. performance is not [only] an act of representation or re-presentation, but is as act of doing the world differently, and that doing has radical potential on the physical level at which bodies are formed/deformed/reformed through the actions that they take (the potential for the performer), and on the level of perception, of the visual display (the potential for the spectator). performance (perhaps all arts, in their own ways), has the potential to operate within recognizable symbolic registers and systems of meaning attached to the body (such as gender, sex, sexuality, race, age, ability, nationality, etc. etc. etc.), but to do so in ways that go against the grain, reconfiguring familiar codes in ways that function in new/unfamiliar ways. this is what I mean by performance giving access to other possible worlds, or ways of world-becoming (yes, there are hints of deleuze and guattari here).
this may be obvious. my friend Deder actually responded by saying, “well, of course. isn’t that what we always do?” and my answer is yes, it is, on some level, but performance is not always considered in this way. too often performance (dance, theatre, performance art, porn, etc.) is approached with the expectation of representation, that the work is showing us something of or about the world, or (perhaps even worse) telling us something about the world. and it might be. but I am interested in what else the work might do, how it might provide as space in which we can both imagine and enact other worlds, other meanings, other bodies and beings and becomings. and I’m not opposed to representation/re-presentation, but rather than looking for representations of the [affirmed] actual, I’m interested in how performance works might actualize virtual landscapes of possibilities. that is (perhaps) the radical potential of performance, that is actualizes/physicalizes the virtual. it is never fully artificial; it is embodies and thus always to some degree actual.

this is how my work with ecosexuality began (I now realize/articulate). ecosexuality is a configuration of sexual and environmental subjectivity that emerged from performance work, specifically the work of the Love Art Laboratory (Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens). their performance work offers another possible world, a reconfiguration of the world in which we live and the way in which we live in/as/with it. it performs new possible sexualities that are not constrained by human organ-ization or global territorializations, and it has done so through reconfigured performatives such as the wedding, the vows, and the roles associated with the wedding ritual. it’s from this set of reconfigurations, this performance work that raises the very possibility of an ecosexuality, that I turn my attention to other performances to ascertain how they too might contribute to the expansion of what can be understood as sexuality, ecology, and the environment–shifting notions of humanity, personhood, ethics, and even love.

so I suppose how I answer myself today when I raise the question, “how does my work contribute to the field/culture/world?”, these are my answers. I am looking to performance works for the ways in which they configure other possible worlds, other possible sexualities as ways of relating not only to one another, but to the world in which we live. this shift in what “sexuality” and “environment” can mean carried with it a shift in possible ethics, the extent of which I cannot even begin to articulate (except to say that it is significant). in a larger sense, I hope I am modeling a way of attending to performance, not for its capacity to represent the world as it is, or to express some hidden feeling or belief about such a world, but for its capacity to enact different possible worlds. performance can never be fully artificial; it is embodied, and as such it is always fundamentally real. it is, in itself and in its display, a movement towards doing/perceiving/doing the world differently.