Performatorium - Day 4

-

WE WALK WITH ZOMBIES DOWN THE PRIM ROSE PATH BY MARTIN O'BRIEN AND SHEREE ROSE AND THE GHOST OF BOB FLANAGAN ASSISTED BY JEFFREY VALLANCE

The entanglement of a community is often rooted in a use of similar language and meaning; a trust of shared understanding and knowledge. For Sheree Rose and Martin O’Brien, performance has meant taking personal practices and activities around S&M out of the bedroom and into the wider world, extending its meaning from the privacy of being among other enthusiasts and inviting others in the public to consider the ways that marginalized bodies, in this case sick with cystic fibrosis, can have agency over illness; to be sick the way a person wants to be sick by pushing and embracing heightened experiences around symptoms. 

Three shallow graves, mounds of dirt covered in cut roses, laid out on the floor of the gallery space. In true spectacle form, the artists were summoned from the dead, displacing dirt and worming their ways out of their graves. Together they explored the extremes of the body's ability to feel and experience through hands-on actions with the body of Martin O'Brien. The extreme sense of the visceral created parasympathy in the bodies of audience members; an unintentional participation in the inability to breathe, the feeling of hands pounding the chest, choking/coughing up phlegm into jars, using implements such as clamps on the naked body.

By enacting these complex ways of being with sickness through durational performance, the artists highlighted the political relationship with the world that is inherent in having a marginalized body, and the possibilities of choice and meaning that exist therein.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
Read more

Performatorium - Day 1

-
In a University classroom of mainly non-arts students, Cindy Baker began the events of Performatorium with a talk that set the festival off on a tone of generosity and openness. After describing the meaning of art as activism, Baker explained the ways in which she was brought to creating a space for the audience’s inevitable reading of her body as content within her performance work, though her early work was not rooted in those meanings. Identifying as an artist with a taboo body, social concerns became foregrounded for Baker through working from the position of “other” (fat, queer, feminist, craft-based artist), allowing her the advantage of being able to see and work from without and within this vantage point. Baker’s talk made explicit to the students that, through art, the world is capable of change; that the ways an artist creates imagery allows audiences access to a dialogue and, through conversation, complicating meaning, and asking pointed questions, gives them acc
Read more