Performatorium - Day 2

GORDURA TRANS (TRANS FAT) by MIRO SPINELLI

As the audience entered and sat on the ground of the Dunlop Gallery, curtained off from the window to the Public Library and sphere of the general public, the pre-performance scene set by artist Miro Spinelli appeared like a still life of a kitchen prep station. A large square of plastic taped to the floor, punctuated by five glass mixing bowls half-full with pillows of off-white bison fat, created a sterile island in the middle of the space. The artist, standing naked in the centre of the plastic, posed in a series of familiar sequences evoking nude-art-school-model-meets-classical-European-sculptures, slowly turning while steadily, quietly, intently meeting the gaze of the audience members.

Reaching for a bowl, Spinelli began working the bison fat. Having performed iterations of this work several times before, the artist had requested a local fat be provided and the organizers of the Festival sourced from the body of this creature so historically essential to the people of this region. Fat sources from previous versions of the performance included soybean oil, hydrogenated vegetable fat, red palm oil, blue grease, butter, lard and culinary spray, peanut butter, whipped cream, babassu oil, mayonnaise, bovine tallow, and olive oil. Kneading, sculpting, pressing the bison fat onto their body, revelling and labouring with the greasy, unpredictable material, Spinelli eventually tilted all of the bowls onto the plastic stage, massaging and smothering and immersing it into every hair, pore, fold, eyelash, cell. Through the warmth of Spinelli’s body and the continual action and movement of working the substance, the materiality of the fat transformed from thick and mouldable to something runny and less easy to hold and control, sliding through Spinelli’s coated fingers, its drips and splatters punctuating the silence of the gallery.

What properties are essential to denote a body as recognizable? What is it that we imagine or assume when we form such conceptions? Descartes used an experiment to consider changeability and our lack of understanding of materiality by looking at the comprehensible properties of a body of wax: shape, texture, size, colour, and smell. Moving the wax close to a heat source, observing the material change, he noted the only properties that necessarily remain are the body’s being an extended thing that is movable and flexible:

“…notice that while I speak and approach the fire what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it becomes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it, and when one strikes it, no sound is emitted. Does the same wax remain after this change? We must confess that it remains; none would judge otherwise. What then did I know so distinctly in this piece of wax? It could certainly be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notice, since all these things which fall under taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing, are found to be changed, and yet the same wax remains… this wax was not that sweetness of honey, nor that agreeable scent of flowers, nor that particular whiteness, nor that figure, nor that sound, but simply a body which a little while before appeared to me as perceptible under these forms, and which is now perceptible under others... We must then grant that I could not even understand through the imagination what this piece of wax is, and that it is my mind alone which perceives it.”

What once provided warmth, semi-solid and snug within the shaped cavities of a roaming prairie animal, became viscous through being scraped from the internal environment of the creature, thickened as it was carried through the cooling September air in Regina, then sat buttery and glistening in a lump on the desk of a curator, slowly and stubbornly gave way to the spreading action of hands on skin, thinned and liquefied as it interacted with the warmth of the labouring body it would merge with through Spinelli’s performance.

Spinelli slid and rolled in the fat, collecting, holding, protecting, reshaping, stood and gazed into the eyes of the audience members, walked gingerly, slipping and regaining balance. They sculpted a pillow of fat and laid their head upon it, the comforting apparatus sliding into their ear. They held it to their face and pressed into it, creating a mask that plopped off. They moved to untouched areas of the plastic and splayed their body on it, drew in it with their finger and, through these action, imprinted the form of a body, made visible through the changed remnants of the body of another.

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KEN L. RODENBUSH

During the first couple of days, the Festival had Ken L. Rodenbush, B.A.., Th.B., A.B.F.E., Forensic Document Examiner, Personality Profiler, and Handwriting Analyst, set up in the adjacent gallery offering free, brief personality assessments for whoever was interested and willing. Rodenbush, an 86-year-old with an immense career in this niche specialization, wore a visor with hand-cut letters signalling his expertise. After having participants write a six- to ten-line letter to a friend, Rodenbush would pore over the rhythm and form of the writer’s words, sharing with them his insights into the meaning of their body’s tendencies around movement. This fun and fascinating engagement was a really wonderful complement to the Festival; a consideration of our everyday gestures, the imparting of the depth of meaning of the body in relation to the mind, a contemplation on authority, and a sweet little elbow in the ribs of science vs pseudoscience.  

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PIECES OF DEATH FLESH by ERIKA BÜLLE

Erika Bülle sat cross-legged on the floor of the Dunlop Gallery, naked, facing the audience. As a backdrop of jarring, heavy metal-ish, spoken-word music started up, the artist leaned slightly forward, reached down, and began drawing a soft measuring tape out of her vagina. As an echo of Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll, Bülle’s action roots the disconnect between women’s experiences and representations of the female body in present-day Mexico, where violence and discrimination towards women can be seen as a direct response to body size, with fat bodies either desexualized (for instance, Mexican Governor Jaime Rodríguez Calderón stated publicly in 2016, “no one wants a fat girl”) or fetishized and hypersexualized (as seen with Anastimafilia).

As the final count emerged from Bülle’s body, piercing assistant Jaye Kovach wrapped the measuring tape around the artist’s thighs, calves, arms, head, using a black sharpie to mark the measurements on her skin. Bülle then straddled a chair, her back to the audience, as Kovach began an elaborate piercing procedure. Though the physical intensity of pulling, stretching, and pinching portions of Bülle’s back, then puncturing the layers of skin and subcutaneous tissue, was made manifest through the shaking of Kovach’s hands and the runnels of blood beading and streaming out of the perforations, Bülle remained motionless and outwardly calm as two rows of four pieces of circular metal (eight in total) were applied to the holes.

Gingerly snaking the measuring tape through each circle, Kovach laced up Bülle’s back like a shoe, like stitches, symbolically editing and closing the flesh, looping the ends into a bow. From here, the piercing assistant set to work creating new holes in the artist’s shoulders and forehead, then inserting long feathers, which Bülle caressed with her face throughout the process.

The artist then moved into the audience with a pair of scissors, dripping blood amongst them while offering those seated a chance to snip and liberate a piece of the sutures, collapsing the invisible wall between performer and audience. Throughout the process of body modification, Bülle’s show of power and self control signalled a sense of reclamation and self-determination of the meaning of her body. As Kovach attempted to snip and collect the final ribbons, Bülle playfully evaded, dancing about the space, luring and then leaping away, feathers fluttering and waving.