domingo, 30 de novembro de 2014

A SEEMINGLY PERVERSE DYNAMIC: TRANSGRESSIVE ART AND CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE


This is a moment I won’t easily forget in the theatre: [Annie] Sprinkle’s smiling face and robust, cooing voice, her very white and soft body largely exposed, encouraging a spectator to scrutinize and describe her labia. I shrink back from the spectacle in my seat, filled with rage at [Richard] Schechner, who is submitting me and other women to this assault on our bodies via this alien medium, this . . . who is she? Is she a woman like me? Does she smile because she enjoys this or smile because she is encoded by pornography to convince men she “enjoys” this? The act becomes more threatening still when Sprinkle offers to “give a little demonstration of cock sucking.” By now blind to objective critical judgment, whatever that might be in such a case, I feel violated and furious at my entrapment here.—Elinor Fuchs, “Staging the Obscene Body,” TDR, 1989
But what has this all accomplished politically? The answer would appear to be, “Not much.” Sure, women have the ability to incorporate sex acts into their artistic work with downtown audiences barely batting an eye,  but has the power structure changed? The three largest festivals downtown in January—PS 122’s COIL, Under the Radar, and American Realness, in which Patek herself is programmed—are controlled by men. All the ready embrace of feminist art hasn’t affected the increasingly sophisticated marketing machine, which promotional materials for virtually every major institution and festival (particularly those presenting dance) using picture of lithe young female dancers. The realm of what’s acceptable material in performance may have been dramatically expanded, but the underlying power structure—the critics, the programmers and curators, the funding bodies—remain largely controlled by men. Usually white, and often straight.
They performed surgery on a female dummy, tap-danced, ran full force into a wall, removed two male dummies in long johns and lizard heads from a refrigerator, talked about terrorism, and endured many many fast costume changes. I’m sure that isn’t the half of it. Near the end, they fought each other with knives, then disemboweled the lizard-headed dummies they’d hung from the ceiling during some hardboiled pas de deux, leaving so much fake blood and real slime on the floor they could have skated away. Here was a “critique of representation” that burst right from the gut. Sexton and Iobst never intellectualized about their stuff, but they were among the transgressive women performers of that era who worked straight from the id to address issues of power and control—a fact I was just starting to put together in October 1985. I only knew then that the show thrilled me.
When Patek re-enters she’s dressed as a stripper, in thong and high-heels, and carrying a bottle of hand-sanitizer. She lubes up the participant’s gloved hands with the sanitizer, then proceeds to perform an erotic dance, rubbing up against him to the increasingly hysterical audience until, finally, taking his hand, pushing it inside her thong, and guiding him to masturbate her. The feeling in the room has changed, from surprised, awkward humor to increasing discomfort, with the blindfolded participant, himself obviously surprised and uncomfortable, serving as a cipher for the rest of the audience’s feelings. It goes on for a while, possibly to the point of orgasm, and then, as the coup-de-grace, Patek turns to face the audience in wide-eyed mortified embarrassment, and runs out, leaving the participant standing awkward, smeared with sanitizer (or, likely, lube) alone and unaware of exactly what was happening. It was a remarkable moment.
Patek takes a seat in the audience and interrogates Roeck as though at a talkback. After praising his courage for speaking out publicly, she begins to question what happened. Did the sex begin consensually? Did the man stop when asked? How loud did Roeck ask? From there, the two stage a series of scenes in which they play out the sort of social and personal doubts of sexual assault survivors. In one sequence, they perform Liz Lerman critical feedback method, taking turns as one another, during which Patek’s character’s own experience is challenged. Since her assailant fled once she wet herself, was it a “real rape”? In another scene, Roeck, breaking character, reads a letter he wrote to Rebecca in which he expresses his belief that by performing in the piece, he himself has suffered emotional distress akin to a rape survivor. As he does this, Patek begins undressing him and fondling him.
The facial is probably the most fraught image in straight porn, suggesting both male domination and empathy (by virtue of meeting the gaze of the other) at the same time. During the filmed sequences, Patek likewise addresses the camera directly, mimicking the POV dynamic porn aims for by creating a link between the fantasizing spectator and the erotic object. The pornographic dynamic comes to dominate our understanding of the piece such that, by the end, in which Patek re-enacts her sexual assault with Roeck fucking her with a strap-on, the audience has been implicated in inetern(a)nal f/ear’s seemingly perverse dynamic: Patek is reclaiming her sexual experience as positive, overcoming the sense of victimization sexual assault can engender, but in doing so she’s implicated the audience by making them spectators in a pornographic performance. She’s basically asking her audience to assent to viewing rape porn as a way of helping overcome rape.
While I do believe that inetern(a)nal f/ear is an essentially positive piece, it’s certainly swimming in dangerous waters. Patek has employed porn—which exists for no other purpose than getting the viewer off—as a way to reclaim a sense of lost agency. By choosing to represent herself and her sexuality using the least subtle aesthetic means possible, she’s leapt straight into the debate of representation of women Fuchs discusses. That she’s employing it as a tactic to deal with the guilt engendered by sexual assault adds a distinctly problematic element to it. Artistically, she’s working in the same area staked out by Ann Liv Young, whose work often functions as a savage critique of the art world’s ability to incorporate feminist critique into its own market dynamics, defanging artists in the process. Like Ann Liv, Patek’s art works as much in spite of its audience as because of it.
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