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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
Any discussion of contemporary art that asserts it is or is framed as transgressive or obscene is problematized by the fact that, often, art that include obscenity of transgressive acts doesn’t actually seem obscene or transgressive in the anything-goes world of contemporary art. When I tell someone that there’s an artist I really like who, in one of her performances, invites audience members onstage to help humiliate her, one of whom is a plant she hired off Craigslist to masturbate over her before she gives him a blowjob, and then does a head stand with a lit candle inserted in her vagina, well, actually in my world, I’m likely to get told, “Well, that’s sort of passé.”
She locates the essential conflict as one emerging within feminist discourse itself, centered primarily on pornography or, more broadly, representation of female sexuality. For some emerging from the 1970s, pornography was just one more form of sexist violence against women that could be done away with. For others, primarily (though not exclusively) in the younger generation of artists and thinkers, this absolutist view missed the point: the issue wasn’t the medium, it was who controlled it. Banning obscenity (however one came to define it) did fairly little for the cause of liberation. For these artists, obscenity could serve the purpose of allowing them to reclaim their bodies, sexuality, and experience.
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.
Here we see Dancenoise challenging the dominant paradigm of girlhood and femininity. Their target is media representations and their use to enforce social gender norms, the power structure of inherent in the broader culture and the violence it exercises on women. Reading it, though, I couldn’t help but think of Patek’s Real Eyes, her first evening length presentation by the Chocolate Factory in May 2012. In this piece, too, the artist is directly challenging the power structure which seeks to impose itself on her, but in this case, the villain, such as it is, is Yvonne Rainer.
In the piece, Patek performs sections of Rainer’s own Trio A, a piece she learned in college (the imposition of dominant forms through education, a throughline of feminist critique). Rainer, having heard about the piece at an earlier stage of development, sent Patek a letter protesting the unauthorized use of Rainer’s work. Having “failed” as a dance artist, Patek invites members of the audience to help humiliate her as she tries to dance. One (a real audience member), is brought onstage and paid to tackle her repeatedly. Another (this one a plant, hired off Craigslist), furthers the humiliation by walking on as a flasher, masturbating over Patek’s naked, writhing body until she proceeds to give him head.
The first piece I saw by Patek was relatively tame, considering. Her short as part of the 2010 Fresh Tracks group at the then-Dance Theater Workshop, was called Jessica’s Story. Patek arrives onstage seemingly nervous and awkward (the hallmarks of her character in performance), and informs the audience that the piece they’re seeing was supposed to be a duet, but her partner pulled out and now she has to do it solo. The subject of her dance, she explains, is an expression of the personal experience of Jessica McClure, the one voice we never heard from during the media firestorm surrounding her, when, as an 18-month old, she fell down a well in 1987.
The next piece of hers I saw was a year or so later, at a comedy in dance festival at Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn, a low-key, low-budget affair and, honestly, not the sort of thing I’d usually bother with. But intrigued by Patek’s work, I went to see her perform as part of a mixed bill. Again, she began with a monologue, recounting her (dazed and confused) disillusionment with dance, and how a friend, knowing she likes “multicultural experiences” invited her out to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, where, to her shock, she discovered that “Africans are so poor, they can’t afford silverware.”
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.