Body Blog

Language/Sex/Performance

2011-12-02T09:09:00.001-08:00

I have become a full-on arts writer for the Art21 Blog. My permanent column on performance, "Gimme Shelter," is a monthly/ bi-monthly look at performance across disciplines. My time has been consumed by writing there, but I don't want to leave Body Blog behind. Sometimes I forget that I can come here to talk about my process and share what usually sits in my journals.

I moved to New York in September after 5 years of traveling and education. It has been an incredibly busy yet fruitful time as I try to invest equally in art making, writing and my healing practice. My collaboration with Oliverio Rodriguez traveled to Philadelphia, where we performed Untitled/Surrender at Little Berlin for the Big Idea, an exhibition curated by Maria Dumlao.

Me, left and Oli, right in a video still of our ongoing collaboration

What to say about the intersection of sex and language, identity and desire, or "gendered desire," whatever that means? I dedicated the performance to Jeremy Rodemeyer, a 14 year old boy who committed suicide after being persistently bullied for his queerness. It lent a darker tone to the performance, and while performing I felt an internal struggle about performing queer desire.

Something was at stake as I contemplated my 15 year struggle with my own sexuality. In the throes of abuse, rape, harassment, and familial and cultural silencing, I have dedicated much of my artistic career to uncovering painful truths as a platform for understanding. I don't know when I will feel like I have succeeded at this, but the work is about staying committed to trying.

For a long time, all I could do was surrender.

2011-07-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

For the month of July, I have been Project Resident at Spoke Gallery in Chicago. Saturday, July 23rd was the opening of my show and the culmination of the work I have done at Spoke.

I have been working with artist, Oli Rodriguez on a video and performance based on surrender in its myriad definitions.

Oli and I expose our relationship occupied within the context of performative submission. From our writing on childhood memories, romantic love, the limitations of the body and sexual abandon, we have created video projection, video on monitor, printed stills and a performance that is part power-play, part caretaking and part dance.

Embodied Rebellion

2011-06-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

In April, I participated in the exhibition, No Joke at LVL3 Gallery.

"Heaven," plaster cast of roast chicken

video documentation of me as Workout Girl, fucking a rotisserie chicken

studio prints of Workout Girl, Fisher price record player with the soundtrack to Yentl

The depth of Winter's darkness, and then the emergence of Spring. It was important to find a way to remember Kathryn and put a celebration in place of her absence. We had a reading for her where we read from the introduction to her Ph.D. manuscript, essays about humor, death, sexuality by her and some Frank O'Hara poems.

In the same month, I participated in "A Toast in Your House: A Memorial Reading for Akilah Oliver" at Outerspace Loft in Chicago. It was a solemn yet cathartic gathering, full of poets from Naropa University and elsewhere. I played the recording the of our collaboration, and it was as if she she was there.

Akilah Oliver 1961-2011

It was hard, just now to put up this image of her. She is still alive for me. I haven't been able to let go. Akilah was an event. She was a contradictory person. She was shy but proud, bitter but optimistic, she would be funny but snap back and become very, very serious. She was real. She believed in humanity. She was child like, but wise. She was radiant.

I met Akilah in 2007 at the Naropa Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where I took her workshop with Jai Arun Ravine, HR Hegnauer and Danielle Vogel. The four us studying with her was electric. We read Fanny Howe and envisioned ghost bodies, slipping through genders. We traced our artistic lineages, where I think everyone mentioned Sylvia Plath for a least a minute.

Akilah and I collaborated that Summer. I played shruti box to accompany her reading. We drank whiskey.

In 2008, I participated in the Movement Research Festival in NY where I invited the poets I just mentioned to read at Judson Memorial Church. I begged Akilah to read, but she was busy with the Poetry Project. She came to it. We spent a day walking through Fort Greene and ate at a Greek place there. I have an uncanny memory of sitting with her, drinking white wine and eating olives and being watched by other customers.

We went to her apartment. The manuscript for A Toast in the House of Friends was on her table, as well as other papers for other projects. We listened to Motown, I watched her smoke a cigarette in the window as the smoke mingled with the sunlight and created a blue swirling form in the room.

We talked about her son, Oluchi (in the photograph she is holding in the picture). He was gone. She held a place for him at the table, she kept him there. I looked at the blue cloud of smoke and light.

We talked about her workshops in public schools, how the students were angry and too fucked up to listen to her, and how she'd eventually bring in music and get them to listen to that and draw, write, paint.

It was like Akilah's strength was endless. She believed. She introduced me to the writing of Edouard Glissant (Poetique de la Relation).

We talked about ovaries, we talked about fried chicken, we talked about facial hair, we talked about sex with men and women, we talked about ourselves as men and women, we talked about money and how it does and doesn't matter.

The walk through Fort Greene as I remember it was overcast. We circled through a walkway through the park and we shared our mourning. We came to one another in place of others. The walk was gray and green.

Akilah. She gave me her chapbook, a(A)gust. I read it and re-read it.

We fell away from one another. I vowed to talk to her again, in NY on a future date.

Now the time is coming for me to go to NY, but I will not see her there. I have to see her here. Inside of me. It is not enough to carry my memories of her inside, but I must put them to use.

I have wondered, in this tender year out of graduate school, if there is a message in the passing of my mentors. It is about being able to claim the space of their rigor and audacity, and to live as an artist and writer in their legacy.

To practice a legacy. What does that look like? First it necessitates the acknowledgment of risk. Then it must be to put yourself in the position of being about to say what you think you can't, or do what you think you can't, and say/do what others almost said or did but chickened out.

Then you have to keep doing that, keep going at that. You are no longer allowed to be a child about your actions, you have to be accountable, unless your goal is to be unaccountable. I am talking about purpose. I am talking about a type of purpose I didn't understand when I was a young rebel. I wanted to escape authority. But now I see a place for the rebel. An embodied legacy of rebellion. That's what those punk bitches taught me.

1 Year Ago

2011-01-22T17:31:00.000-08:00

I haven't known where to post these pics, as Mike and I were experimenting with each other's styles, but one year ago we performed in the Czech and Slovak Republics together:

Love Disease @ The D.I.V.O Institute, C.R.

The space between______ and ________.
@ Medium Gallery, S.R.

Yesterday it was negative something degrees in Chicago. Eventually, I trekked out to celebrate my birthday, but was so stricken with the cold that I couldn't sleep once home. I do not know how to effectively warm the tissues around the titanium once the cold has penetrated it. I have spent the day at home recovering, as if ravaged by an invisible, ghostly hand. It is at times like this that I think about love and intimacy - how in conditions of chronic pain or illness, a loved one becomes an extension of the self. It is a scary moment when it feel as though autonomy is stripped away and an intimacy is created out of lack of control. The ambiguity of boundaries where it's not invited, but it's also not uninvited. It just is. What places love comes to -

I am fortunate to have had love in my life where my vulnerability has been met. I have been embraced, I have been taken out of myself and I have learned to have patience in moments of exposure when pain gets the better of me. It is a difficult balance - how to embrace myself in instances of extreme pain without banishing my capacity for feeling: going numb. How to maintain vitality and openness even when it seems easier to reject love?

The work that Mike and I made was tenuous, bold yet delicate as we explored intimacy before complete strangers. I realize now that I am faced with a double tenuousness: to remain open to an intimacy with myself, and to do the same for another. I wish it didn't have to be this way. I wish access to my own being was more democratic. That desire to shun or block participation or reveal weakness has always felt so primal to me. I don't know what that means about the nature of suffering.

I am brought to thinking about mercy. On one hand it is defined as compassion, pity, benevolence or divine favor, and on the other hand it is defined as "in the power of" or "subject to." These definitions say 2 very different things about power and about how we work in the world, how we move out from ourselves, how we love. Sometimes being "in the power of" feels as good as being granted compassion, however much this speaks to my own tendencies in love.

I wonder, though, what this means when it is turned toward your own subjectivity, where is mercy? Why isn't everything, every state, o.k.? Pain is a sensation, but pain strikes, pain tolls a bell, pain demands. What does pain deliver? How can I come to know myself better through these trials? What kind of an artist am I with or without this knowledge?

Where I'm afraid to go

2011-01-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

"Writing is the movement to return to where we haven't been 'in person' but only in wounded flesh, in frightened animal, movement to go far, and also effort to go too far, to where I'm afraid to go..." Helene Cixous

First entry of 2011, and after 2 Chicago winters, I am no more seasoned in my 3rd. I have not been "making" since the Links Hall show. No movement, very little drawing, some writing.

I have been riding the wave of visibility as an art writer for the Art21 Blog and Chicago Art Magazine.

It does take time to maintain that practice. Observing the work, steeping in the work, saying what you saw, what it activated, what the artist is about all takes time and another level of understanding. Journalism for me is like a combination of the critiques I attended at SAIC and my own more diaristic investigation of having an experience with the work.

Something I am having to accept is that I am processing 2 years of non-stop feedback from all sides. Within that time, I cultivated my own form of perception and learned how to talk to fellow artists in the midst of very difficult processes, disappointments, or complete surprises.

This has been what has always attracted me to an education in the arts: how you make something out of nothing, and then how you talk about it.

So, I feel like I am balancing this delicate position of being one who looks, and wants to direct where others look, and then no longer being an observer but a participant. After a major performance, I always feel like I need time to reflect on it and almost become someone else in the period of reflection.

Like I want to look back at this other Marissa who did this performance removed from who I am now. I don't know why I do this, and whether or not it is a form of hiding that only my subconscious gets. Either way, the studio is a painful place right now.

I am on the edge of writing and making, of building layers of flesh on my body and stripping it bare beneath that flesh.

I am witnessing myself and then I am pulled into the core of what that self doesn't yet know. The present is a dark corridor, a transitional space between this world of unknowns and the next world of what is manifested.

Most of what I am doing is waiting, oh the irony as soon as Faith Wilding retires. But I have to say that it feels like the most natural thing to do - not to reach out and claim anything, but to just let what comes reveal itself. It's a form of creating space both inside and out in the world that I almost forgot was possible after many years of pushing ahead to the next thing. It's frightening because I have doubts, what if nothing comes?
"irony," Faith Wilding
performing Waiting

But there is a wig here, a shirt that smells like chicken grease, glitter boots and sketches for a new installation. They are ready for me when I am ready to take them up again.

I am continuing to think about Kathryn, her feistiness and bold advice to me in my artistic direction. I feel affected by her absence, still but in a mysterious way. When we met I didn't know I'd be involved in art writing.

I didn't know that when writing my Top 10 of 2010 for the Art21 Blog, my #1 would be Felix Gonzalez-torres and none of the performances I had seen that year. A major shift is gathering strength within me, and this is the first hint of it.

I have always been invested in ephemeral art, and my first taste of this was dance, then live art and only recently have I allowed myself to become aware of the ephemeral in relationship to objects.

What does it mean to give the viewer an experience of his/her tenuous relationship to the living world with an object that is intentionally a trace?

How to make the viewer aware of that inevitable, imminent absence that is the other side of what marks our existence? What is so important about participatory art if the viewer doesn't have space to live it, or to experience what it's not?

"When I write, I ask for your hand; with your hand I'll go too far and I won't be afraid anymore of not coming back. Without my knowing it, it is already love." H.C.

Then I feel that participation can be a bridge - it can bring someone into an entirely different community, even if it is only for a moment. Sometimes that intervention from another person can serve as a catalyst to push you into a new space where other possibilities exist.

I am undecided whether it's art's goal to actually manifest these possibilities or simply hint at them. I don't know this for my own work, I haven't seen the other side.

I performed with Oli Rodriguez last week, and it was different for me. We followed a score - eating was involved, as it has been lately (popcorn), and make-up application. We were making one another into some andro-Gilbert and George characters wearing matching clothes.

Oli Rodriguez & me at the former Ritz Camera Store

I had this sensation while working with him - I liked the feeling of mystery about who were to one another in the performance. I liked the subtlety of how we matched one another and what we could also forget about our identities. Perhaps I have traveled so far on the archetype continuum, and now I am letting that go.

More and more Winter ahead, and this corridor to get through, more writing to extend/test the limit of the voice embodied and more forms to work through - to inhabit.

Gathering in the Storm

2010-12-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

Almost like a cue, I mentioned David Wojnarowicz in my last post and the Catholic church stuck it to the Smithsonian to withdraw the screening of "Fire in My Belly" because of ants crawling on a crucifix in the video.

I can't believe it's 2010 and he is still under the same censorship as he was 20 years through the NEA. I feel like this ability to be ostracized throughout time must be part of the artist's charm at this point. Maybe it's important that it pisses enough people off still so that we remember that everything is not o.k. If he was hailed as a star and his art was universally revered, what kind of wake up call would we receive?

I especially adored Diamanda Galas' response to the withdrawal of the video, as well. Her AIDS anti-mass concerts have been some of the most powerful events I listened to and watched as a young artist. She turned herself from an opera singer into a channel for calling up what the Reagan administration feared most. She was the voice of the institutionalized plague.

I'm not writing today to analyze the recent events around "Fire in My Belly." Let's just say I have a healthy heap of righteous indignation that I'm shouldering about the entire situation. What would art be without these situations? If anything, it's drawing more attention to the crisis and making the impression of the video more indelible than it would have been if it were simply shown in the National Portrait Gallery.

I keep thinking about Wojnarowicz's body transfigured not only by AIDS, but from "inheriting a diseased society" as he put it. His writing taught me to look no further than the body for...everything.

I have spent the entire day at home, not being able to gather the strength to make it out of my home because of the storm. My hip has been feeling that ache and stiffness, as it does every winter, but Chicago is the most brutal. Sometimes I can't believe I decided to come here because of a performance M.F.A. and I can't even move my body. Right now, this blog is my prosthesis for connection with the world.

More to come, but for now click on Joyelle McSweeney to read her blog post on the video - it's hot.

Bittersweet November

2010-11-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

Workout Girl performing Baby Jane, Links Hall Nov. 5
photo by Mark Jeffery

This has been a month of extremes - the highs from a packed house at Links Hall for Don't Hang up On Me! , exceeding our Kickstarter goals for funding the show, and excitement from Time Out. I saw some colleagues at the shows from Oxbow, and it blew my mind to think that I had designs for this show in August. I was sweating my ass off in a cottage, writing about chicken, dance and video, and I did accomplish all of the goals I set there.

Danny and I made the audience wet with our Springsteen-inspired duet, Danny, Yasi and I made her personal workout video, Father Figure, Tessa and I made an empire of chicken-feet in Ways of Eating Flesh, and I played out my childhood terror and fantasy in Baby Jane, dancing with a chicken to "Fame."( Videos of these works will be forthcoming on my website.)

All kinds of things have been cooking here - I did a short stint for the Art21 Blog, where I interviewed critics Jerry Saltz from New York Magazine and David Velasco from Artforum.
I am currently wrapping up new writing on Deke Weaver's show, Elephant as well as a couple juicy interviews that will be posted on the Art21 Blog soon.

I also took the plunge and applied for a Fulbrigh t grant to the Czech Republic to create a new performance-installation piece there entitled Velvet Girl. We'll see how the government feels about letting me out of this country to make work about Czech sexuality, but in any case I am dreaming of meeting the amazing Zuzana Stepkova again and giving audiences there a run for their money or his:

I have also just finished a stint working for the Chicago Humanities Festival 2010 themed, "The Body," which hosted some amazing performances, lectures, special viewings and screenings. It was the best work environment I've ever experienced, mostly because of the devotion of the staff who believe in the organization's mission and make the Festival an eclectic and unique mix of scholars, artists, writers, etc.

It was exciting for me to contribute to the exposure of a new audience to the work of local artists Miller & Shellabarger and Jennifer Reeder. I think I have to save an account of this for another post, but needless to say these artists spoke to the theme, "The Body" in a provocative and intimate way that made me proud of being a Chicago artist at this time.

This has been my Fall season - write, write, write, dance, dance, dance, tape, tape, tape, chicken, chicken, chicken...

that being said, I must speak of the extreme low that the season has also brought for me, the untimely passing of Kathryn Hixson, professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kathryn was the thesis advisor for my graduating M.F.A group. There were 9 of us in this group, and we all had regular studio visits together to talk about our work. Kathryn was our coach. She had a discerning eye, knew how to play and took our personal goals for the show very seriously. She was both nurturing and tough, always encouraging and excited for a push past the status quo. The woman loved risks.

Kathryn Hixson photo by unknown

Of course, this sad event is a way to open a space for talking about vulnerability, which I have vowed to do on this blog, but it's hard. Kathryn used her own physical vulnerability to inform her relationship to art, and I think her fearlessness in criticism came out of the challenges she faced in her own life. Writing about art was a way for her to vocalize her presence, and her sense of humor came from her brushes with fate, where she could turn to death and say, "oh yeah, you" and continue on with her brilliant thinking.

Kathryn's death occurred right after the run of my show, a bittersweet ending. I worked with peers from our thesis group to make that show, and Kathryn helped me with the early ideas for my solo performance. She loved my red glitter boots, paint streaks and cruddy objects. When I was reading a text for a performance in my studio for her this Summer, she said, "you know, you are reminding me of David Wojnarowicz," whom she didn't know I had studied and written about in college. It was the best compliment.

David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Duchamp) (1978–79/2004).
Photo: Image courtesy of P.P.O.W.

Kathryn had come to my thesis installation to watch me perform one afternoon in May. She must have stayed for a couple hours, as viewers came and went, either compelled or driven away by my ritualistic waving of dirty nylons. She stayed at the entrance to the room, fixated and weeping. I danced up to her and tied her jacket around her waist to protect her from the yellow paint on my costume. Then I held her quietly before ending the performance.

We never discussed what moved her, and the hug was part of a fluid motion done intuitively and in silence. We shared something for a moment that was much out of the context of scholarly discussion or jokes about Bruce Nauman.

It was the unspoken goal of my performance, but few had the courage to stay and witness the real exposure that my writing and movement revealed about my past. Kathryn's presence affirmed the strength and courage it took for me to make that piece. Her encouragement further helped me face my own vulnerability and use it as a source of power. I will miss her, but I am incredibly grateful to have had her in my life. Her strength will live on for me as I continue to wildly follow my artistic path in the face of doubt, pain and fragility.

David Wojnarowicz Untitled 1992, Courtesy P.P.O.W

"It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands..." DW

Don't Hang up On Me!

2010-10-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

As time progresses with this blog, its place in my life is shifting. It has been nearly a year since my show at the Chicago Cultural Center, and yet there are maybe 3 posts that account for how I have spent my time. I have also felt the pressure in graduate school to only show what I am producing, although when I started this blog, it was all about my body, its recovery, pain and my use of it as an artistic medium.

I am still not entirely sure how writing this blog affects the world, or the networked world, and whether I even feel the need to write about my body the way I did in 2008. I am changing my attitude about my own disability, I think. I no longer feel betrayed that Claudia LaRocco decided to write about my recovery or my vulnerability because of my disability instead of my great artistic talent and history. I care even less about using this blog to promote my work because there's Facebook. I want to go back to my own sense of urgency as a writer and artist, and I want to relate my confusion, questions and handicaps as much as my triumphs, or attempts.

From Nov 5-7, I will be performing and screening videos in a shared evening, "Don't Hang up On Me" at Links Hal l in Chicago. It's kind of themed around artists who work with dragging and identity shit. I say identity shit because it encompasses all the drama that comes up with gender identity. All three of us, Anthony Romero, Suzy Grant, and myself are actually hilarious. We are going to do the show in a rotation of acts that criss-cross and overlap, making a kind of round robin out of Links. I am looking forward to having a night of being "out" with them, in a way that will be high energy and fun.

I have found that I am an artist with competing sensibilities. I am inspired by DIY culture, and pride myself on my own grit - I wear and re-wear my costumes over and over and throw around materials. I like to mark my territory. But then, you know, I'm informed by Modernism - Gertrude Stein, and Postmodern dance that came out of the Judson Church Movement - Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and I never know how this should figure into my messy performance art fall out. Do I give a monologue, do I shave, do I warn the audience beforehand, do I rub something on my body in a lyrical way, do I wear a tucked-in shirt and masturbate? These are my questions right now.

Then I look around, I see what my peers are doing in their parts of the world, Ann Liv Young, for instance, or Margit Galanter and I can't help but feel caught between these very contrasting concepts of the body. Ann Liv, finds a boundary and explodes it. She doesn't ask for permission. She doesn't invite the audience. Margit, on the other hand, has spent years researching somatic practices, and is more concerned with how what is happening in the body gets expressed, than the drama of live art.

These are questions of embodiment. Whenever I get a dose of one I run to the other. I like feeling feelings, I like feeling my body, I like listening to my body, especially in my artistic process. I like fucking around with materials, perversion, shock and aggression. I want to be able to feel through all of these states equally without letting one take over. I don't know what this will look like yet, but right now I am in the process of working with a visual artist to make a dance and video artists to make performance for video.

I am interested in how artists with different sensibilities can use them to enter into different forms. The visual artist, Danny Greene, and I have been using Authentic Movement techniques to learn about one another's bodies, how we work with space and how to get at the subtlety of our movement variations. We are working with The Boss for some movement cues, and channeling our own feelings through his music. Danny is still and yet, he possesses a subtle power that intrigues me. I am learning a gender lesson, but I am not sure what kind. We learn from another's soft contortions, and we pull back the hair from our foreheads.

On another planet, Tessa Siddle and I dye her homemade chicken feet for the camera and contemplate our positions in contemporary domestic craft innovations with this activity. I talk about the sensuality of chicken flesh, and my first experience of fat juice rolling off a chicken thigh as a child. Chicken has been working its way into my materials lately, as the scent and grease are evocative of my childhood and expectations for growing -up. Being a good chicken-making woman, a good mother, etc. If I use art to test my own limitations and to have witnesses for that, then maybe this is another tier.

I actually started writing this post in the morning, but since have been to Links Hall for a tech meeting. It was totally exciting - the place is going to be our playground, and the audience's, too! I want it to be o.k. that I am going through something in my body that is finding all these forms for expression without linearity. I like my androgyny, I like femme dragging and I like to be gross. I like to be formally nasty. I also feel tender a lot, and sensitive to people all the time. While I am dancing in glitter boots, I am aware of the hardware in my joints, and the challenge of it is all part of what fuels my act. If I didn't have the physical challenge of pulling off having a functional body, it wouldn't be half as interesting to me.

What about having a functional identity, and what about persona? Anthony was saying tonight that all three of us operate in these personas and that it's because we need to do that to workout our shit. It's true. But, it's not drama. It's down to earth, real bodies in real time wanting to experience everyone there. It's necessity.

Entangled Impulses

2010-06-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

I now have a website:
www.marissaperel.com

Click on over to watch videos, view images, read about performances and upcoming news.

From April 30-May 29, 2010, my thesis, wet works, was on view in the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. On selected days throughout the exhibition, I performed as Workout Girl.

Throughout graduate school I have been developing this persona that was part inspired by my childhood connection to "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John, and an epiphany I had while watching Mitchell's Death, a performance and video by Linda Montano.

Something happened to me while watching the video. The duration of Montano's narrative, a chant that told the story of how she found out that her ex-husband died, put me into a trance. Her face was full of acupuncture needles as she chanted, and over time the flesh dropped until her mouth was the only part of her face moving. At that moment, I felt a sensation under my own skin, maybe a connection to my grief, and I found the name for my persona.

This was in September 2008 in a tiny corner of a studio. I had written a long poem addressed to myself as a girl with the voices of my parents, uncles, aunts and cousins talking to me about how to be a girl. As in, how to be a daughter or pseudo-sister or playmate or plaything. Or showing me how in acts I don't want to remember, ballet school, aerobics, etc.

I remembered dancing with my estranged cousin to "Tiny Dancer" and to songs by Madonna, especially "Lucky Star." Those albums played on her Fisherprice player, we bounced up and down on her bed, and I remember the whiteness of the room. When I remember it I imagine us wearing white sweatshirts from the 80's with big rolled up sleeves. Yeah, and teased hair.

So, the white space of the studio and then gallery became the stage for this persona. I substituted the big white sweatshirt for white nylons and tried to dress my whole body in them. Trying to capture the viscosity of girlhood in its lubrications and discharges, I rubbed everything with Vaseline. And then any time I talked about my dad and his effect on my body, I poured glitter all over. In one performance, I joked "I'm Madonna gone wrong, no I'm more like Jane Fonda."

I was every childhood impulse taken to an extreme, blowing up the mundane in billows of baby powder, exploiting childish ignorance to perform a violation of innocence. I have performed Workout Girl about 6 times in the past 2 years, adapting her to different spaces and audiences. In January, I packed a suitcase with my wig, glitter and red reeboks and took her to the Czech Republic to perform at the DIVO Institute: http://www.divoinstitute.org
with Lucie Bila's Czech pop hit "Laska je laska."

After years as a young artist surrounded by the insurrection of free jazz and noise music, learning about improvisation and movement, I have found myself back in the pop womb I thought I pushed out of as a teenager! I needed to get lower and lower to believe. I needed to get out the Whitney and ask myself, "where do broken hearts go?" The answer: they go to art.

As I spent time in wet works enacting chaos and my fully dysfunctional eros, I noticed that certain men needed to be there. They'd stand for a long time watching my videos, reading the text I was writing on the wall, watching me play on my dirty nylon pole, etc. The deeper they'd get, they'd want to sit or even lay down on the floor.

A lot of these men I wanted to embrace.

I could tell that they felt my chaos, and it fueled their fantasies or their curiosities. It was the first time that I felt it was really o.k to be seen, behind the wig, powder, memorial wreath, etc. It was o.k. to be a woman. I lost my defenses, I no longer needed to confront the audience. We were just there encountering each other. It was an empowering kind of empathy that I could only reach in the recesses of that dense spectacle.

It's hard to make art at the border of gender-ed performance and feel like you have something to say that hasn't been said. The 90's were an angry era of identity-based performance, visual art and poetry that created this certain lens through which anything that looks like it is now seen. It doesn't take much for an audience to feel confronted and immediately bored. So what do we now? Embrace the nasty, the bored, the tired and the dissociated. Bring it in and run with it.

Post-Equinox Reflections on the Dark Return

2010-03-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

Although it has only been a few months into the New Year, it is also last few months of my graduate school studies. I started this blog in response to Claudia LaRocco's description of physical condition. I felt like my pain was put on display in a way that I was trying to grapple with by opening it up on-line. It soon became a place to talk about my process of making performance while getting my M.F.A at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. More events began taking place in my life where my lived experienced of disability and my artistic practice needed to fuse, or were being pulled together by forces beyond me.

In a a sense, one could draw a correlation between the idea of Sedlec Ossuary, from which this picture is taken, and the difficulty in nature of the kind of fusion I am talking about. After the Black Death, there were so many bodies needing burial that instead a half-blind monk in the All Saints' Chapel took the bones and stacked them in patterns until later a carpenter was hired to make a chandeliers, a coat of arms, etc. The place is a powerful memento mori. I've been feeling more like the half-blind monk, attempting to make something seemingly cohesive that is out of control, impossible to understand, and further put into question the more I try shaping an aesthetic reality out of it.

I am reminded of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle as departure point for a discussion of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and its psychosomatic effects on those who suffer from it. Perhaps this monk stacked the bones as an obsessive attempt to make order, much like the actions of war veterans in Freud's essay. Perhaps my desire to revisit my own trauma, either as the subject of my work or within the adversarial physical structures from which I create it contain this same obsessive desire. If undergoing sensory deprivation, cutting my flesh or tying it up with nylons forces me into being present with myself in an unmediated social space, it is also an embodiment of a certian kind of denial. It is saying, "this is my body, but this isn't my body." Sometimes the body made dramatically apparent can be more of a radical distancing than an urgent provocation into a deeper connection.

This is a paradox that I became increasingly aware of during a trip to Europe this past Winter. Viewing so much art from the turn of the century centered on physical and mental suffering, whether staged or real, not to mention a poignant visit to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague with its stacks of gravestones splayed in every direction, instigated a desire to look more introspectively at my pain. My artistic process is changing as I seek to articulate secrets that I still have not disclosed however much I bare my body or its stories.

It is as if the self I seek most to expose is standing just outside the periphery. What do I see, what can I see, and of these sights which can I share and which stay buried? This is, again, a question of intimacy. Of course, an accident elicits a kind of unconscious intimacy in which the needs of the victim require aid beyond a kind of controlled boundary or limit. This was my condition for much of my adult life, and it coincides with a kind of body blending I have experienced as a victim of abuse in the past. I interpreted this ability to stay intact through so much interception of my body as a type of super-human quality that enabled me to be an artist.

"throwing the body into the fight" R.H. on Pasolini

2009-12-11T11:43:00.000-08:00

It has been a month since I (we) performed shared body. It took me about 2 weeks to fully extricate my psyche from the space of Preston Bradley Hall after all of that continuous movement revolving around the darkness of the unlit dome. Madeleine and I met yesterday to recap our collaborative experiences, and now I am watching the footage of those 3 hours.

There is something in this work so much more than other pieces I've made that involves time, not so much as a structure but more as a collaborator. shared body unfolded out of a long process of negotiating the content of disability, the forms of my work and Madeleine's work and our individual processes, and the research behind the movement and objects. We made a world.

A figure that grounded me in this process and inspired my meditative body-placement is the German choreographer Raimund Hoghe, who came to Chicago in September to give his performance-lecture, "Body Space Music " at the Goethe Institute, and who also gave an artist's lecture to the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute. I had been researching his work for years, intrigued by his process and curious about his persona. The photographs of him in books were mostly focused on the image of his physical deformity. Seeing him in person opened me up to an ecstatic feeling about art that I realized I had almost abandoned.

Hoghe's presence demands more than just spectatorship. He is not asking the audience to be stunned by virtuosity, but to be present with him in the instance of language, movement or sound unfolding. To Hoghe, bodies tell stories in their fact of presence, bodies can be words and words can be bodies, a choreographer can be one who makes an atmosphere where things can happen.

His performance was just as revelatory as it was mysterious. The apparent and hidden played equally powerful roles where one could not exist without the other. I came upon a realization while watching him that the story is already in the body, and all of the movement of the body is informed by its history whether or not the personal history is revealed.

His ability to remain open to a moment of encountering is a skill informed by Hoghe's experience, his study of his own body and the bodies of others. I think of him as a warrior in a culture where it can seem scary and often demeaning to open to one's own vulnerabilities.

My experience of Hoghe is that of our vulnerabilities touching, a kind of bond that generated strength. This is performing and un-performing, it is making the body visible for reasons wholly other. That's risk.

Julie Laffin and I had many conversations over the six month span of conceiving the piece, where we differed on our desires to perform "out of" disability. What did I want to show, what did I want the audience to understand? How could I create an atmosphere of possibility? Could the collaboration create a piece that would be a space of reckoning and possibility at the same time?

If I don't show you my literal scars or deliver an exegesis on my physical struggle, will you be able to read my body or sense my intimacy with my own pain?

I am still investigating the difference between what it means for art to be one's identity vs. making an art that is informed by one's identity. I was able to move continuously for 24 hours in Freedom of Information not because I had overcome my physical vulnerability but because I was unafraid of contacting it. Can this be art? I am asking...

(photo of Raimund Hoghe by Rosa Frank)

Partake in the elusive touch of "shared body" Nov 9

2009-11-03T16:23:00.000-08:00

It's almost the moment I've been waiting for...since the Spring...the premiere of my new collaboration with Madeleine Bailey, shared body at the Chicago Cultural Center from 6-9 PM, Monday Nov. 9. The whole experience of making this piece has felt like the closure of a long cycle, and I wonder if Julie Laffin and Clover Morrell knew on some intuitive level that they would catalyze such a thing when they brought me into Site Unseen.

Of course, graduate school has started up again so I've been subsumed by rhetoric (chewing on it) and this complex circumnavigation of H1N1 that seems to be hitting students as bad as the resurgence of combat boots (those aren't gonna help you fight the virus). So, I've been trying to inhabit and shape the piece as intimately as possible given these challenges.

It is hard to land when you have so many voices destabilizing your logic, your way of locating yourself, problematizing your practice while showing you how everything you are doing is always already historically situated, as if the work was there waiting for you to enter it vs. being your own maker. This is why I came here! But standing under the dome of Preston Bradley Hall, trying to envision a performance based on physical vulnerability and limitation, I've had to step out of this art cocoon (or vice) and tackle some very personal issues, which while they might motivate my work and live within my aesthetic have rarely ever existed at the forefront of it.

I did a lot of crying in the corners of Preston Bradley, laid down on the floor, thought about all the hands that went into making my body possible again, and how it is that suddenly I've been given this space to perform these possibilities. So much of my adult life I've had to re-think my autonomy as a woman and artist based on the need for care from doctors, therapists, healers, family, friends, lovers, etc.

Shifts, gaps, failures and transformations within or from these relationships have forced me to ask myself what it means to have a body, and whether my focus on the body as subject, as art, as performer, as site is all there is or needs to be.

Maybe recovering in the context of a New York modern dance world was a continuation of the manipulation of my body that I experienced as a patient, i.e. this is how you lift your arm right, this is how to maximize efficiency, etc. whereas if I had recovered in another place I would have had a completely different perception of body and meaning. Watching dance as a body that aspired to be a possible body, I was the uber active witness, somatically filtering the vocabulary and information offered by these performing bodies to navigate the new terrain of bone and metal and the complexity of a reprogramming nervous system. So, I stand under that dome with tourists walking around me and inconspicuously begin to move - it makes me laugh a little because I realize I'm enacting that awareness of vulnerability that I feel as a person with a disability that is not visible to others.

The feeling of being in public knowing I look like a person there, but meanwhile carrying this wound, complexity, tenderness that disrupts that continuity of persona and the ease of appearance/ placement/ presence/ control. I felt like I needed to keep that cloaked, invisible and only show the surface parts that I knew could perform. Relying on my body is precarious whether in every day life or in performing, and taking it to extremes has been way of asking it to prove that it still means, as in that there is a life for a disabled body beyond being a patient, beyond being an object of examination, correction, study.

Madeleine questioned me about this a lot, sending me e-mails about my blog and the sense of isolation in the language, in my aspirations to communicate with the audience and my feelings of failure, and we started on a dialogue about restriction and limitation that has formed the foundation of our collaboration. Her delicate yet incisive observations led her to create objects that externalize this truncated or metonymic relationship of my body to the world. She has carved out a space for me to move and has allowed an emptiness to live in the installation that allows the isolation to be the spectacle/ spectacular presence. Adam Rose, Georgia Wall and I move in and among her sculptures and my bed as our own objects and worlds, sometimes colliding, acknowledging, but never knowing. The space is our home while being completely alien, just as the bed proposes the possibility of rest whether or not it actually enables rest, just as the sculptures imply an intimacy that can be felt but never seen.

(photo taken by John Sisson. Adam Rose, Marissa Perel, Georgia Wall
activating sculptures by Madeleine Bailey)

Site/ Non-site

2009-08-21T20:06:00.000-07:00

It has been a lively Summer for the body of Marissa Perel.

In June, I took a road trip with composer, Chris Peck to visit many a Brooklyn ex-pat scattered about the country. Swamps, fireflies, Four Roses Bourbon and an epic stop at the Black Mountain College Museum were all part of the prelude to a residency at Earthdance in Plainfield, MA for the SEEDS (Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance and Science) Festival curated by Margit Galanter, Olive Bierenga and Melinda Buckwalter.

A synchronicity was in the air as an artistic awakening and spiritual awakening occurred for me simultaneously throughout the month. One important part of the residency was getting in touch with the Contact Improvisation community again and reconnecting with that kind of somatic experimentation. I had a profound visit with Daria Fain, choreographer and Qi Gong instructor where one of the many things discussed was the body's inner-wisdom of trauma and the pull of the body toward an understanding of it whether or not our conscious mind is aware of what is happening.

A visit to Tsegyalgar, the first Dzogchen community in North America, brought me to the feet of practitioners of Vajra dancing. The dance takes place on a large mandala and the goal of it is Rigpa, "instant presence." I was moved to tears by witnessing the dancers turn and twist as they let their bodies fall into the form. If it's possible, I believe that as my body was opening up to the universe in my own process, I could feel their bodies opening up to the universe through Vajra.

Another remarkable presence in the residency was Camille Renarhd whose text about the body and translation in my panel, "Performing Needs" articulated the complexity of body language, or the dichotomy between the body and its own language vs. the language we assign to the body. Assisting her with translating parts of the text from French to English was a ritual in of itself that entailed turning over dry leaves, arranging birch, and observing the delicate and cunning suction of mosquitoes on our arms and legs. Stay tuned for that in a coming post.

SEEDS culminated in a jam night and a day and evening of performance. I have to admit that after being away from Contact Improvisation for a few years, I was unsure about how to approach the jam. My own inner-sensibilities competed with my desire to belong, meaning that on one hand I did not feel ready for that kind of trust and intimacy of bodily contact but on the other I just wanted to run up and embrace someone. Eugene Williams approached the floor in his wheelchair and I was immediately inspired. What started as a mysterious brushing against fingers and heads became a fluid and luxurious spiral of arms and torsos and as we danced and rested in turns.

As it turns out, Eugene became quadriplegic after a wrestling accident in high school and is now about to undergo cancer treatments. He also knows my professor at the Art Institute, Roberto Sifuentes, as he took workshops with him and Guillermo Gomez Pena. As he described the performances he made, they sounded pretty bold and hilarious.

I talked with him about the commissioned project I am working on for Site Unseen at the Chicago Cultural Center that is themed "disabling conditions." One suggested title for my project was "What the fuck's the matter with you?" which is his response to people constantly asking him what happened to him, how he got fucked up. It was from a story about a female quadriplegic friend who worked in the television industry who would reply to people with this question when they were shocked to find out that she was wheelchair-bound. Though I am engaging a different approach to the theme, I did appreciate Eugene's spark and confrontational approach to the issue. But I observed that that was his unique strength, the same thing that would motivate him to get to a contact jam as the sole quadriplegic in the room without fear.

I have to laugh again when I think about the way he proposed that title...

The following day, Chris and I set to create an environment for what was about to be a ceremony for us to become brother and sister. To make a long story short, we are both only children, yet deeply connected in a way we can't understand and can't seem to live down either. After our road-trip and time spent together in tents and beds around the country, we realized that if we became siblings, we would always have one another to see each other through the hard times as well as the good. We wouldn't have to feel the dread of isolation, loneliness or sole responsibility. We created a mythic birth that has something to do with John Cage, Gertrude Stein and Thich Nhat Hanh being birthing us from three umbilical cords, but anyway...

...I excavated an old Airstream and made an installation that told the story and we performed the rites of the ceremony just outside...

...This was the test as we wrapped up the residency and headed to New Hampshire as newly bonded brother and sister. Mostly everything was the same with the exception that we were less afraid to argue and our empathy deepened. We went to the mountain where I had my accident. Someone who happened to be there that night met me and described details I could not recall, and then he escorted us to the actual site.

I found a rut between a tree and rock and felt that it was possible that I had been struck there
and flown from that spot onto the trail.

Chris and I sang a version of "In the Pines" that we re-worked, and then I laid down on the trail.

I felt myself disbursing into the atmosphere, into the ground, becoming part of the surrounding landscape and it felt like home. Here was where I died. Here is where I was reborn. For a moment I couldn't distinguish myself from the place, and it felt as though the universe was inhabiting the wounded sites of my body.

I've been reading a Phaidon book on Conceptual Art, and in it Tony Godfrey described Robert Smithson's work as a play between the site and the non-site, "...the site being the 'real' place, the non-site being the representation of it. A non-site could, for example, be a pile of rocks relocated in the gallery space. But the site was always, he was aware, in a process of change and entropy."

Something about this struck me -made me think about how we approach spaces. If I had not been crushed on that trail, how would I have approached that site? And because I have, it functions within a cathexis where I might never be able to see it only as land. The way that now I might never be able to see my body as just a body. It is a gateway to another world. This problematizes the site/ non-site duality.

If we are unable to locate ourselves, whether through memory or sensation, are we existing in a site or non-site?

If a body cannot re-member itself does that make it a non-site?

Is the gallery in the above quote considered a non-site because we are assuming it has no memory or relationship to the natural world and does not experience change?

What happens to identity during the process of entropy?

What happens when memory is lost at the same speed that change occurs?

These are the questions I ask myself in bed, touching my scar. I know there is a world enclosed in that scar, and it might not even be aware that it is part of a larger body, that it carries a body even.

This is part of the shifting contextual web for sharedbody, the project at the Cultural Center on which I'm collaborating with Madeleine Bailey.

Madeleine: what is this architecture that is your body? how does it inform me as a more or less, passive or involved being that is outside of you?

monster cipher

2009-06-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

It's June and I am gearing up to go to Earthdance in MA for the SEEDS Festival.

I've started a couple different blog posts since the April post, but I erase them deciding
to write later...

It's later now and I am still not sure what to say.

Desire.

Roland Barthes, blah blah.

Desire is shattering my pelvis.

I am looking for a language for my pain. I am looking for a way
to communicate my pain out of love.

I am working on a way to transform the pain, which feels like a
problem of language. The way for transformation to begin is
by giving language to that which is hidden - to that which
resides within the flesh without a name.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it just happens. Language comes later.

Or the language already exists - if the body is its own text -
then perhaps the scars are names. When a lover touches your
body, maybe s/he is naming it. Is that name for your lover or for you?

Perhaps it's Frankenstein. Communicating your pain is like bringing out your Frankenstein, mis-matched, swollen, uncontrollable, an anomaly inside of this "you" person you are working so hard to build, become, maintain. The desperate part with a mouth full of clumsy language.

"I want"

"I need"

"I am"

Where's the moment of distanced irony?

ah, there.

o.k.

A mouthful of desire-mud. The child Frankenstein sleeps
and screams in turns.

"Conquered by ...love...I burst all bonds"*

2009-04-23T19:17:00.000-07:00

How many months can go by until I feel able to pick this thread up again? I'm in art school and in that sense I am on a different time that is not so much marked by the calendar. Going between a small cement corner called a studio and a larger cement room painted black called a "rehearsal space," I have been gnawing on the corporeal, the hyper-real - spending TIME.

Since Freedom of Information, I can't seem to get away from the walls. Most of my time choreographing is actually rubbing up against walls and hitting them. My flesh can't seem to get enough of this kind of caress and impact. I get on the floor and feel it with my ass, arms, the back of head until I flip over, etc. This has been an ongoing activity since January. So has the desire to push my body in other ways beside movement. This desire has caused a lot of fear and confusion on behalf of fellow artists, teachers and audience members, however the inspiration comes from contemporary performance art idols such as Marina Abramovic and Gina Pane - but more immediately, Andre Stitt.

3 years ago, visual artist and musician Fritz Welch co-curated a show at the Drawing Center called "Acute Zonal Occult Outer" in which Stitt performed for the duration of the 8 hours the gallery was open. (It's funny I'm deciding to talk about this right before Welch and Stitt's collaborative performance/accumulation, "SHIFTwork" at Roger Smith Lab Gallery is about to close.) I went there to get a glimpse of his "akshun," but ended up staying for at least 4 hours. Stitt himself exudes a raw intention that makes it hard not to be drawn to him, but makes it hard to look at him too. You don't know if he's performing or raising the dead - and you realize he doesn't need you as an audience member but as a believer or something close to one who is willing to believe right there.

What struck me was a moment after intense aggression toward himself and the walls and floor of the gallery (ah - that seems to be a thread) where he sits down on a chair, puts a big black flag across his lap and cuts "LOVE" into his left arm. Then he puts a black burlap sack on his head and sits there while the blood trickles for a while. My feeling in that moment was of a profound disbursal of whatever emotion or energy he had been conjuring with his aggression. I felt like having been there for hours made complete sense - his presence and willingness to open himself in that way connected me to him in a way that I have not been able to stop thinking about for 3 years.

At the time I had been working with urine and pig's blood in my own work, a departure from the dancing and musical improvisation that made up the majority of my world. I felt that there was a dichotomy between the type of risk taking I read about in books on performance art and the times when Marina Abramovic would grace NY with her presence, and the type of performance work the majority of my peers valued - not to say that it wasn't risk taking at times - but in this sense it was mostly kept to sexuality and representation.

It was 2006, still 2 wars, terror, etc. etc. that I have talked about on the Freedom of Information blog and in this one too. You know. So, to see Stitt bleeding there - it hit a nerve. It sparked a flame for me about testing my own limits as a person not as a performer per se - but to really think of my own skin and how I feel about its boundaries.

Which brings me back to this wall choreography and endurance - that I have not been able to shake something since dancing for 24 hours, and I'm in grad school, learning, learning, learning, how to be critical, how to be seen, how to talk, and meanwhile entering a breaking point with what I have known as "the body of marissa perel." All of these entries about chronic pain, empathy, anger, art are not serving my body now.

If I am inscribing my wounds into this blogosphere, I want to communicate that they are opening up to something right now that is not about recovery but still about healing. It's not about the quotidian reality of a body in pain, but more of an interrogation of pain and its usefulness. Would I have had the same reaction if Stitt just said "LOVE"? I have a feeling the answer is no. If I didn't have to dig deep to keep dancing at 5:00 PM to make it to midnight, would I have ever been able to guess that the pain would become a motivating factor in my perseverance as opposed to a limitation? Definitely not.

This sends me into confusion in a social way - like I still am "disabled" - I can't lift certain things, I can't move certain ways, right now I have bursitis again in the joint with the metal (which leads me to believe it has to do with seasonal transition) and can't sit without getting stuck. But I'm not disabled - and when I am moving I am still aware of that gift and that it could leave me one day.

I am also confused about my desire to try cutting myself in my performance work now. It's not scary or necessarily profound, but it is intimate. It's something that is normatively called masochistic, but this I find entirely strange. Masochism is rooted in punishment, but I don't believe my desire originates there. It originates from the opposite maybe - the flesh is miraculous, wounds heal. But how does this speak to my own deeper wounds? I haven't figured that out yet.

Lack of fear of a superficial pain is too much of an easy answer, though I don't discount it.

I have performed this piece "black seeds" a couple times, once at BARN in NY and another at Elastic Arts in Chicago, and it feels like the whole environment becomes a working experiment with my own hybridity as a dancer and performance artist, disabled body and hyper-sexualized body, believer and non-believer. Cutting has taken place as well as planned and unplanned audience participation that conjures something I can't define. This usually makes the audience uncomfortable in a way they want more of or really, really don't.

I'm splitting the membrane of my skin, but that's only the beginning of the splitting. My vulnerability splits the membrane of the performance, and that creates a bigger kind of bleeding than just the kind my body is doing. I want to experience a palpable permeability even if it hurts me emotionally. Is that sacrifice taken out of its symbolic value? I go somewhere - and the audience goes there too, or observes my travels, or neither (because they have to close their eyes, or because they are angry). And I am wondering if it is o.k. to try, even if I fail - to go somewhere I haven't gone before in front of people.

At dinner with a couple of friends a month ago we got into a conversation about crying on the El. Both of them have done this many times and complained and laughed about people coming up to them and either trying to help them or comfort them or reprimanding them for their behavior. This is related to my question. This thing is happening that you can't control - you're shattered and you can't hide it. What does that do to the people around you? Does it make you more or less of a spectacle than the person, by contrast, who seems very together and offers you a tissue or tells you to shut up? Something is being felt and known between you whether or not it's acknowledged and that thing is ugly or banal or tender or all of these.

For me, the audience is like these fellow passengers...in their own worlds and unpredictably attentive, desiring, and I can either match that and fulfill it or I fall short, I can't read them, and I can't give them what they want (which is deeper and more superficial than I can evaluate without knowing them as people). I run, I get up, I run I get up, I hit the walls, I bleed, I sing out of my own need, desire, effort, and willingness. It's not so much about what it means as what it does. The body, its wound, or the personality that animates them. I'm not saying this as a conclusion, but as a way to talk about use.

* This is taken from a translation of Vergil's Aeneid that I found in my aunt's papers after she passed away.

twist & breakage

2009-01-27T10:10:00.000-08:00

The reason why I did not post last week was due to something simple: it was too fucking cold in Chicago. What is it like to walk through below zero temperatures with metal in your body? An analogy: how does your laptop feel after walking a few blocks in such a temperature? It's freezing, right? Now imagine one of your joints feeling like that.

Something happens to me from enduring this weather. The strain and difficulty wears on a sense of safety and stability that causes deep strain lasting far after I have been able to get warm again. I've been attempting to examine this feeling, and it's reminding me of another residual feeling after performing Freedom of Information.

It's about reaching the breaking point but not being able to stop. Your body continues, but inside some part of you is deadening, twisting. I am going to give a lecture on Freedom of Information on Monday, and yet I am still working out this resistance, this twisting that happened to me around 9:00 PM that night.

I went to see Jenny Holzer's Protect, Protect here at the MCA. Viewing blown up documents and LED screens filled with testimony from the Guantanamo hearings, that 9:00 PM feeling arose sharply. Holzer's work provided a kind of mirror that reflected the relationship between my surviving body and descriptions of bodies that had been/ were being actively destroyed.

Even though I consented to the endurance test of Freedom of Information, I nonetheless intimately experienced a breakdown where everything was lost and I felt completely disoriented and broken.

Sensation, memory, and the somatic bond between them...

My breaking points (inside and outside) as a space for information to enter...

Xenia

2009-01-13T13:16:00.000-08:00

I have been deliberating about how to approach this weekly post. I have had a discussion of the host and guest relationship in mind, but here I am attempting to talk about "other" in a newly defined way.

Xenia is the my best introduction to this discussion.

The Greek term is conceptual, naming a relationship between host and guest that is ritualized whereby the guest makes her needs known to the host, and the host honors those needs by providing for them. The experience of hospitality is ranked/ lauded based on how well this is executed.

There was always the possibility of a divine presence appearing as a guest to test the hosts to see if they were worthy of encountering the divine. We can find traces of this in religion now, in Catholicism where incorporation of the host is part of a divine ceremony. Derrida discusses xenia in On Hospitality, stretching the concept further to dissect issues of place, territory, control.

If I address my hardware through xenia, I acknowledge its presence as the guest for which I must provide as host. In an optimistic sense, the better I provide for the guest, the more I am able to receive from it by way of positive results.

This gets sticky for a couple reasons.

One is that the guest is an "it," metal which lacks a consciousness of its own (though lately I have been questioning that). Another is the ambiguity of "results," if I don't take care of my guest, I can't move, or move without pain. Does this mean the gift is walking in of itself? I'm thinking about a little bit more here, like a power given to me by this machinery that is equitable to revelation of Zeus at the dinner table.

When Derrida talks about the relationship between host and guest, he describes an implicit tension in this relationship partially driven by control. For the host to be able to be hospitable, she must have control over her domain, and over the guest as a result. The necessitates the guest remaining in the subject-position as the other. If that changes from duress, a situation of abuse of the host, of the guest never leaving, or of the host preventing the guest from leaving, the reality of hospitality has changed into something else.

Applying this theory to my body reveals the complexity of my own subjectivity. How do I know when the hardware stops being a guest? If this occurs when it demands more of me than I can provide, it has seemingly never quite been a guest, then. I can control it, as in dancing for 24 hours, however it will control me equally as retribution for the performance of this task.

What happens when the other is incorporated into the self, changing that self into something unrecognizable to her? I, as your host, take you into me, and you as my _____ (guest/ other/...) transform me. This is often understood as the position of the cyborg, however I am interested in another term.

Receptivity & Participation

2009-01-06T13:06:00.000-08:00

As a response to Claudia La Rocco's article in the New York Times: Across the Country, Dancing in Solidarity for 24 hours (Dec. 30th 2008) where I was featured as a surviving body, I have decided to devote this space to the discussion of my body, its history and related bodies and histories. As La Rocco described, in 2001 I shattered many of the bones on the right side of body while careening through the snow on an inner tube. As a result, my right hip and arm have been reconstructed with titanium plates, rods, screws and wires.

As a poet, I have traveled through the world of pain and loss in recovery with language. My desire for more/ new/ better language caused me to turn to music, dance, sculpture - forms that are propelled by kinesthetic awareness and comprehension. While living in New York amidst choreographers, I became informed about movement techniques, and danced and choreographed as well. I also developed a course of study in performance/ body/ live art, which has led to my current position as a graduate student in Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Body Blog is the channel from my physical body to this network that is also a body. It is my way of seeking to integrate the personal into the artistic and theoretical, thereby stretching the membrane of the self, the blog into something more - a way of opening my body yours.

In reading this blog, you are participating in my recovery and my work as an artist. I will be posting entries that pertain to these manifold interests: recovery, theory, body art, movement, language and architecture.

I will be discussing endurance, survival, sacrifice, failure, disintegration and entropy....